Letters and Brochures - Word v HTML

Expert Agent has two methods of generating Standard Letters and Brochures - "WordLink" and "HTML Editor"

We'd generally recommend WordLink but there might be reasons why you would want to use HTML Editor or even both

 1.   WordLink

As the name suggests, Wordlink uses Microsoft Word to edit and print letters. This is the easiest to setup because other than making sure you have either a version of Word (it must be Word 2007 or better) or a 3rd party word processor that reads and writes DocX files, there’s no setup). It is also the most powerful because it uses Word itself. It even seems to work well on a Mac (although we don’t provide support for Mac users).  You may wish to use HTML for email purposes.

See Creating Letter & Brochure Templates

Pros:

• No setup
• we supply sample letter and brochure templates
• no layout constraints - almost anything you can do in Word can be applied to a Wordlink template.
• Familiarity - no new wordprocessor to learn

 Cons:

• You need Word 2007 or better (if you don't have it - look at subscribing for Office 365 for a few pounds per month (but make sure you have the desktop version of Word).  We advise you use Office 365.  (How do I create Brochure Templates on a Mac?)
• Can be slow on an older PC - Word will need to start up, open a document on the web, import photos and display.
• Using Wordlink for emails isn't ideal - your message is sent as an attachment to a covering email rather than in the body of the email

2.   HTML Editor

If you first implemented Expert Agent before 2011, you probably use the original HTML Editor which uses HTML documents – essentially mini websites.

There’s no problem with sticking with this approach if you have developed skills and a set of your own letters.

The HTML Word processor can also be used for brochures (though we do not recommend this approach for new businesses or those creating new templates due to the complexity of setup and inflexibility inherent in this method of production).

see: The article called HTML 

 Pros:

• Very fast - doesn't need to load Word. No need to upload finished documents
• if used to send emails, the text is in the body of the email rather than an attachment
• The ability to email one page in a letter set - great for sales memos where one party will get a subset of the full output

Cons:

• HTML isn't ideal for print output - no margins, no headers or footers and fonts can jump around
• The editor itself (the best of a bunch of 3rd party components that we've tried over the years is a bit "buggy" and has a mind of its own sometimes.
• Complex layouts such as A3 Landscape or text over pictures is almost impossible
• Print quality suffers - outputs are 96dpi maximum rather than 600dpi or better in Word
• HTML is a frustrating, black art. Remove a bracket by accident and the whole document stops working
• For all the reasons above, we won't train you on HTML and we provide limited support for our HTML standard letters, brochures and reports - change them at your own risk