What do you think about a CMS+Theme designer that compiles to Microsoft Word?
I write 100's of pages of business documents per year in Microsoft Word for my business.
My pain point is threefold:
A) Managing versions
B) Formatting to company guidelines
C) Keeping content separate from formatting
D) Managing comments
I have an idea for a document authoring tool that combines my favorite non-coder sites' functionality to solve these problems.
A) Use the Squarespace Content Manager to organize sections of a document, with ability to input text, table, and image blocks.
B) Use the Svbtle dashboard to organize documents and their contents (think file manager with TOC tree nested beneath each)
C) Use the commenting system from Medium for comments
D) Theme picker to format content from A)(ideas?)
Use all of that to export to a Word Document that has my formatted, designy content where I can make final adjustments to the document. Has it been done? What are pitfalls? Why do we use Word to write content and format documents when it is bad at both?
Having used Microsoft Word since Word 2.0 (and WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS for good measure), I am not sure I agree that it's bad at managing content and formatting if the user fully understands how its layout engine works. It has useful multi-author collaboration features, especially as of 2013.
Word's power gets unlocked once the user fully understands its styling and themes system. Reformatting a document to company guidelines becomes painless if every element is associated with the correct style. It is similar to CSS.
The value of rendering to Word escapes me. I would render to an HTML5 document and then to PDF.