Lectora 2006 ROI (Higher Productivity)
February 9, 2006 12:00 AM
If you don't think Lectora 2006 is worth the upgrade price or you do but need a way to convince management, try this -- an ROI of 600% annually!I have been using Lectora 2006 for about 5 weeks now and I have to say the enhancements are really great. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t have everything, but what a great step forward. While there a lots of improvements, here are the ones I use all the time. These alone should make the investment in the new version really worth it. The timesavers listed below each save 3-5 minutes a day easily. That's a total of at least 30 minutes a day and I listed only the ones that I use. There are more. This 30 minutes translates to about $25/day. If the cost of the upgrade is $1,000, then you make you have broken even after just 40 days or about 2 months !!! Here is my list of the bigger time savers. It does not even try to include all the new goodies. Add your own to the list.Time Savers5 min/day - Paste as for text (avoiding having to go to Notepad)3 - Paste as for pictures, diagrams, etc. (avoiding having to go to another application to create .gifs or other graphic files and avoiding the .bmp space hog)5 - Guides (avoiding having to adjust x/y coordinates) 5 - View in Browser (not having to wait on publish or publish in one page title to see if things work as you think they will)3 - Changing font, color, size of multiple blocks of text at once.5 - Re-edit shape color, border (not having to redraw)5 - Groups of objects (fewer actions, ability to drag all objects together without having to select each time)5 - Shift key for constrained dragging horizontal / vertical (not having to realign objects or go into properties)2 - Eyedropper color selection2 - Persist tree visibilityHere is a little more detail on my personal experiences.Major Time SaversPaste asNow you can paste directly from Word, PowerPoint, or any other place you get the text without having to go thru Notepad first to clean the text. Since my SMEs typically give me text in Word, this has and will save me thousands of paste, select all, and copy from Notepad. GuidesWith the guides I don’t have to keep going opening properties and clicking on the Position and Size tab and then setting it to what I want. You can line things up very easily.View in BrowserWhat a time saver this one is. I have just about worn this button out. So many times the browsers have idiosyncrasies that don’t show in run mode. Going thru a full publish before, even using a test title with just one or two pages took much more time than it takes now.Re-edit shape color, borderSaves having to set these first. Many times I have wanted to change these after the fact but not possible.Time SaversGroups of objectsMy courses use a lot of mouse enter/exits to show a highlight arrow, box, and sometimes a balloon (small text box of more info). Before I had to code 6 actions, now I am down to 2.Shift key to constrain dragging to horizontal or vertical. Very helpful. Auto SaveNice. Saved me a couple of times. I have set it to every minute so I lose as little as possible. But I have not needed it very much. Very Nice Run-time CapabilitiesTransitions This is at the very top of my list in this category. This enhancement has cut out the need for some of the Flash and brightened up a lot of pages. I am not a Flash person and we had to use a special (and expensive) resource to do this part. If changes were needed, it always took a while. Now we can at least have some fundamental motion on the screen very easily. I use it on highlight boxes to have them “drawn” as the page displays. Transitions make the end product look a lot more professional. I am working on one now where arrows continuously move around a flow diagram demonstrating what happens. It’s not trivial but you can do it directly in Lectora. Nice.Table, Cell optionsOh my. I have really used this one. We have a need for showing a block of text with a heading over it with a different background. Before this took 2 text blocks and it always took time to line the two up just right. Now we can do it in one with a table and it is a lot easier to keep the heading and the body text blocks lined up..Right justified menusMy client is very happy with this one.Back button This is nice as this now works when publishing to executable. We could do this before in HTML but that code did not work in executables. Suppress Netscape warningsWe use actions to enable the PageUp and PageDown keys on the keyboard to be the Previous Page and Next. We also enabled the arrow keys and Home and End keys. Before I got warnings that Netscape did not support these. My client uses IE exclusively. When I published to HTML there were so many warning messages for Netscape, I could not find the ones that applied to IE> Now I can find the warnings relevant to IE. Big help.Annoyances Well, all that glitters is not gold. I have found a few annoyances.Persist Tree Taking you back to where you were the last time you were working on a title is nice. Problem seems to be that if you run a Find, it opens EVEYTHING! Before I could just close the title and reopen. Now I have to click on the all the open chapters to see what I am working on. Minor inconvenience. Maybe they can come up with a command to collapse all expanded objects.constraining dragsNo “Paste as” shortcut key I use this so much, I could really use a shortcut key of some kind.Can’t really change arrowsNow that I can change the color and size, I want to change the length and direction like you can in PowerPoint and have it still look like a 3 px arrow. I guess that is coming.Requests for 2007And, the biggie, learn from Fireworks and have the most commonly accessed properties displayed on a bar as soon as you click on an object. This will avoid the right clicking every time you want to change some property.Edited By: bpitman on 2006-4-1 8:50:8
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