Adobe After Effects vs. Adobe InDesign vs. Microsoft Publisher

I would recommend Adobe After Effects to a colleague above all other comparable software that I have used, however, with the caveat that it can be time-consuming to learn to use and can be frustrating if you are not familiar with the software. Difficulty aside, once you begin to understand how to use Adobe After Effects, it is the only software for the job.

Incentivized

Adobe InDesign is very well-suited to creating professional-looking page designs. If you want a newspaper or magazine to have attractive pages that go beyond simple templates, InDesign is the best option out there, to my knowledge. It's less suited to scenarios where people without page design skills are responsible for creating pages, as it requires some training and skills to use effectively.

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Microsoft Publisher is well suited for almost any situation. It is something that I'm sure has far more advanced tools than I use or am aware of, but it is also very simple for entry-level users to create professional documents quickly. I have used it for very involved brochures in real estate scenarios and I have also used it for very simple "Construction Zone" signs at a job site under construction. There are so many uses for this program!

Incentivized

• Adobe After Effects allows you to exercise a great level of control over how to animate just about every aspect of an object. You can control animation speed of entry and exit, the direction of rotation, scale, position, and so many more attributes.
• Adobe After Effects is so popular that you can find so many paid and free third-party plug-ins and scripts to incorporate into your project.
• There is such a breadth and depth of features available in Adobe After Effects, you will never get tired of exploring the program and using its many features to take your projects to new heights
• Adobe After Effects works well with other products in the Adobe Creative Suites including, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Media Encoder
• Adobe After Effects allows you to customize the setup of your workspace and panels

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• Customization - With Adobe InDesign, as well as many other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite, I can fully customize my workspaces and save different workspaces. This makes it easy to navigate through my project and have the panels and tools I need easily accessible and configured based on my project needs.
• Styles - Adobe InDesign has character styles, object styles, and tables styles. This speeds up my workflows and allows me to easily apply the same format across multiple elements. This is super helpful, especially when working with length documents.
• File compatibility - I can easily export my files into so many different file types.
• The Book feature - This feature is really helpful when creating books or very long documents with multiple sections.

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• Design of my quarterly full color magazine: (usually 28-56 pages in length)
• Design of the quarterly planning system used by me and others in the annual conference.
• Design and layout of any document that requires graphics/photos.
• Simple to use with ample flexibility and strength of features

Incentivized

• I would like the Re-Link file structure to mimic Premiere.
• I would like to see native .obj importing and manipulation.
• I would like to see better audio editing available within Adobe After Effects. if it could be given a separate layer/panel.

Incentivized

• Not naturally a WYSIWYG display (this is an option, and doesn't always work as intended)
• Moving images and photos around while holding an additional key
• Layers or objects are not easily clickable behind other objects.
• Adobe InDesign does require some fair system resources to work smoothly

• Formatting in general. It's a pain to refine a layout in Publisher in my opinion.
• Microsoft is so invested in their approach to software and making it look and feel like an Office 365 application that they inadvertantly cripple applications like Publisher.
• Earlier versions of Publisher gave you a lot more latitude and creative freedom. They were also much easier to work with. Not everything has to look like it's part of Office 365. They did the same ... thing to Access.

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I will renew my use of After Effects since it's affordable and always has been reliable. They also always continue to update new features and add new things to compete with other software out there. I also like all the 3rd party plugins out there that keep my interest for the future and new toolsets and creative solutions.

I've had great experiences with the product and plan to continue to use it. It has been my go-to product for designing and creating materials. I have had great luck with it and have been able to create all of the needed marketing materials that have been requested for our company.

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We use this product 2-3 times a month and have not been able to find a comparable alternative.

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There's a lot of features and functionality that Adobe After Effects offers that can be hard to navigate at times. Depending on the depth you plan to use the software for, that can take some time to learn. The built-in templates and tutorials really help soften that learning curve. Once you get past some of the basics, it's fairly simple to use.

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If you know what you are doing it is an amazingly granular and powerful application. You can control pretty much any aspect of the design and layout of your documents and make changes globally and rapidly. But, if you don't know what you are doing...you will be staring at your screen in bewilderment for a long time. You can learn it, but be ready for a hefty time investment.

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There are a few quirks with Microsoft Publisher that make some functions a little tricky for new users at first, but most of our employees are able to figure out the quirks and work around them to use the product for their job. It is relatively high on the scale of usability.

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I've needed Adobe InDesign team very little which is a bonus in and of itself.

One of the advantages of Adobe InDesign is it is faster and less glitchy than Microsoft Word.

Adobe customer support is wonderful. They genuinely care about their product and the end user experience. The products they create have always been innovative and continue to improve. They have a huge chunk of the user market in their field and still strive to improve. This is such a big deal for me and other small business/organizations that need their products and don't have a large voice on our own.

Incentivized

Adobe support is ok but not great. Chat support often doesn't initially understand the question at-hand and it takes awhile to get to the right agent. Phone support has long wait times, and though I've had more luck there, it does take quite a time investment if you are looking for help. However, Adobe does have some online learning solutions available as well as a knowledgebase for frequently asked questions. If you're looking to learn how to use the platform, there are lots of resources which can typically be found in a few Google searches. If you have a technical issue with the system, that's going to be a bit more of a time investment as far as getting a tech's assistance to resolve the problem.

Incentivized

While I have not directly used support for Microsoft Publisher, I have used their help files and found them to be useful. I have also found that most answers that I need can be found through simple web searches and chat platforms. In all though, there are very few times when the preloaded help files have not given me the answers that I need.

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Attending Adobe MAX each year is extremely valuable.

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The online training works well and is not wholly necessary as it is user-friendly and you can learn by doing.

Implementation was smooth and easy.

I find Adobe After Effects to be superior to iMovie and Final Cut Pro in that I am able to do much more with the software. It isn't as limiting as the other two. I also like that it isn't an Apple product. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Apple. There is a bigger learning curve with After Effects, but once you get the hang of it, there's really no comparison.

Incentivized

Microsoft products do not match the aesthetic tools that [Adobe] InDesign offers, cannot support the customizable options available for export, and do not produce documents with as high a degree of accessibility. That said, they do have their place in collaboration in a team- I'd consider Office to be the first step and [Adobe] InDesign to be the final product.

Incentivized

Microsoft Publisher is more for beginners, or for basic needs, anyone with some familiarity with the Microsoft suite should be able to use it easily. If you’re looking to create something more graphic and advanced, you’d probably want to look into something like InDesign, which is not as user friendly if you’re not familiar with it at all. For basic needs the average employee should be able to use Microsoft Publisher with ease.

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Working in a cloud environment makes it easy to scale and share resources.

• Adobe After Effects has a great impact on business as maximum work can be done in one software
• To run this software you need to have good configuration system
• Motion Graphics, 2d Animation and video editing can be done in one software

• A great ROI for time in my small architectural practice, [especially] when a design has been updated and a report needs to be submitted. We can be submitting many reports that all look similar, clean and beautiful. We just save as the file and replace the images with more updated images. This way the client finds it easy to navigate updated reports, as many as they can be.

• we have invested on our Microsoft license for our team and that has made a very big productivity for making banners and holdings for our projects as making it from third party would cost much higher and the return is very well over the comparison with third-party vendors
• Functionality is very easy, so we don’t have to train much to get it in production and use it efficiently so we don’t have to invest much on training and learning things and we can work on it directly with a very basic knowledge as well
• It has functionality to get stored and share things directly to the OneDrive and using curated links, which is very secure and reliable to transfer files without losing picture and banners quality and share them in lossless quality.

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