WordsFlow Makes It Easier for All of Us BY CALI CENTURIÓN, CPSM, SENIOR PROPOSAL MANAGER, J-U-B ENGINEERS, INC. I will admit here and now that I really used to get bothered by technical staff not providing the information I requested from them. And I complained. Then some smarter-than-me people made suggestions about how to get what I needed, like talking in-person or over the phone to the person — almost interviewing him/her — to get what I needed. Right off the bat, I realized that 99% of the time, the person wanted to help me but felt overwhelmed by my request since my request competed with billable deadlines or marketing simply wasn’t a typical task and it took longer to switch gears into “marketing mode.” Understanding the “other side of the coin” made me want to find easier ways for technical staff to be involved. There are many processes and tips on how to communicate within a firm to gather the information we need, which many of us have heard and I am not going to mention them in this. Instead, I’d like to talk about a great tool I have been fortunate to come across. It is an InDesign plugin called WordsFlow. What Is It? Simply put, WordsFlow allows you to export threaded “stories” or text from InDesign directly into a Microsoft Word document. Revisions can be made in Word and the link refreshed in InDesign to show those changes. Because I use tables often in my proposals, I have found that the “look” of the exported WordsFlow file is closer to the InDesign layout than the files I have simply placed without WordsFlow. How to use the plugin was taught to me briefly and, because I had some time, I started playing around with it to see how it worked and how I could apply it to the proposals I was creating. I have since used it in several different formats, including a “free form” layout, which I have seen most often with municipalities and private companies, and forms, such as Section H of the SF330. Knowing I will be using WordsFlow changes the way I set up a document; it causes me to be more strategic about what goes where and which text boxes are threaded together or where to break the thread and start a new section. I may break or separate sections based on topic or author, meaning one author might have a subsection or three whole sections, so I would keep his/her sections threaded when feasible. How Does This Tool Help Technical Staff? MS Word is a standard tool that most, if not all, technical staff have had to use throughout their schooling and on the job — it’s “Goals don’t separate high performers; systems do.” – Richard Young 17
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