Today's longer blog offers some perspectives on choosing the right authoring tool for your RFP response that works best for YOU. To make the RFP writing task easier, look for a tool that will let you collaborate with your content creators, is easy to use, and produces documents that can be edited easily.
Let's start with the most ubiquitous: MS Word. Love it or hate it, MS Word is the most widely used program. This means that almost everyone knows the the basic rudiments of using MS Word today. However, not everyone understands how to make MS Word obey. For example, numbered headings and lists, very popular in public sector RFPs, are not easy to use (Quick Tip: check out MS MVP Shauna Kelley's useful site for tips on how to create numbered headings). We've come across many Ontario Government RFPs that use nine levels of alpha-numeric headings in the RFP that need to be mirrored in your RFP response! This is a horrible practice...not only does it look horrible but it is frustrating to work with 9 levels...9! (Side Note: I once asked a public sector procurement officer why 9 indented alpha-numeric heading levels, as this is a very difficult way to present RFP questions. I was told "because our vendors are used to it"). Don't get me started on MS Word's default settings, which unless turned off can make your document a nightmare (I'm thinking of MS Word's style settings that are by default automatically linked to the "normal" style, and my all-to-easy ability to inadvertently create an unlimited number of "normal" styles). And to add icing to the "cake", MS Word behaves differently across its different versions and operating systems. Sometimes, it's not even backward compatible with itself. But it's the most widely used program and anyone can use it.
Apple's Pages is a very easy to use tool that makes beautiful documents and does have the ability to save files as MS Word (mostly true to the original...most of the time, except when they're not, which is usually discovered right before your document needs to be submitted...something that is sure to add additional stress to the RFP response process). And Pages is unfortunately not used as ubiquitous as MS Office.
So what about Adobe's InDesign or other similar tools? Sure, these are powerful tools that can create beautiful documents. But they require specialized knowledge and are not designed to be authoring tools. Design tools, of course! But they are not easy to use to write content. And...if your InDesign expert leaves your organization, what then? We've done several projects where the source document was originally developed in InDesign and then needed to be converted to MS Word to be updated. Time consuming, frustrating, and not an efficient use of time. And if your document looks too polished, as inDesign products often are, this can go against you with RFP evaluators in the public sector (they want to receive information for evaluation purposes, not "glossy" brochures for marketing purposes).
On a final note, Google Docs has come a long way and is an excellent way content developers can collaborate on RFP development, share content, and make edits in real time. However...there is always a "however"...when the Google Doc is downloaded and converted to MS Word some formatting annoyances often occur (we've frequently see extra pages and spacing and inconsistent fonts). This means that the downloaded document needs a format check before submission, adding extra time you may not have. What's really good about Google Docs is the cost (free) and the ability for multiple people to collaborate on the document at the same time...this feature cannot be praised enough.
So there you have it...Word vs. Pages vs. InDesign vs. Google Docs. In my opinion, stick to MS Word. It's the Devil we know :-)
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