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Rating: 
Summary: Great for long documents
Review: FM is a life saver for long documents. I've seen more corrupted Word documents than I care to remember. FM is fast, stable, and versatile. Its weaknesses are typography and colour management.What it offers over Word:
Stability, table styles, inline graphic placement options, sideheads, runin paragraph styles, independent and outline numbering systems that always work, graphics library (reference pages), conditional text, variables, complex headers and footers, straddle heads, ability to pull in photoshop and illustrator files directly. What it offers over InDesign or Quark:
Numbering, table styles, inline graphic placement options, sideheads, paragraph styles that can straddle columns automatically, variables, equation editor, footnotes, various automated lists. Yes, the keystrokes are left over from its Unix heritage, and there is only one level of undos. There is a learning curve, but for long documents, it has no peer. Ventura is not as stable, and LaTex is too complicated. I wouldn't recommend it for making a newsletter, but for long and technical documents with numbering, tables, cross-refs, etc. it is a wonderful program.
Rating: 
Summary: Bottom Line--It Just Works!!!
Review: I've been using FrameMaker for about 6 years, and each release just gets better and more reliable. I've been using version 7 for about a year now, and it has never crashed once, nor has any document become corrupted or unusable. That may sound like faint praise, but after years of using Microsoft Word and having large documents suddenly forget where chapters begin or having numbered lists re-number themselves nonsensically, I SO appreciate FrameMaker's stability. I've made manuals of over 400 pages with FrameMaker with never a problem that wasn't of my own making. This software is just really SOLID and RELIABLE and great for doing large documents. I'd never go back!
Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect
Review: If all word processing/desktop publishing software worked this well, the world of writing would be a better place. It's not perfect, but it is as close as any piece of software I've worked with in the past 23 years of doing word processing and desktop publishing. With tremendous power and rock solid performance, FrameMaker 7.0 does everything it claims to do. The user delineates what it needs to do and FrameMaker does it. This is such a remarkable improvement from MS Word that our tech writing department has a whole new upbeat, can-do attitude that everyone who works with us has noticed. Need for your document to have complex numbering? FrameMaker does it with ease, grace, and accuracy. We got four days of in-house training and have sailed forward with grins on our faces. This is excellent software, worth every penny we paid for it and the training. If you're tired of fighting Word templates and numbering problems, if you just want your documents to behave, if you're tired of Word "helping" you behind the scenes, FrameMaker can change your desktop publishing world from hell to heaven. If you just need to do simple documents and brochures, get WordPerfect. If you need the power to produce documents more complicated and complex than that, get FrameMaker.
Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect
Review: If all word processing/desktop publishing software worked this well, the world of writing would be a better place. It's not perfect, but it is as close as any piece of software I've worked with in the past 23 years of doing word processing and desktop publishing. With tremendous power and rock solid performance, FrameMaker 7.0 does everything it claims to do. The user delineates what it needs to do and FrameMaker does it. This is such a remarkable improvement from MS Word that our tech writing department has a whole new upbeat, can-do attitude that everyone who works with us has noticed. Need for your document to have complex numbering? FrameMaker does it with ease, grace, and accuracy. We got four days of in-house training and have sailed forward with grins on our faces. This is excellent software, worth every penny we paid for it and the training. If you're tired of fighting Word templates and numbering problems, if you just want your documents to behave, if you're tired of Word "helping" you behind the scenes, FrameMaker can change your desktop publishing world from hell to heaven. If you just need to do simple documents and brochures, get WordPerfect. If you need the power to produce documents more complicated and complex than that, get FrameMaker.
Rating: 
Summary: The little things DO count
Review: This is a review of the Windows version. Framemaker is a really good product for complex layouts and unusual page sizes. So for newsletters, fancy foldout marketing pieces, and non-standard size manuals, it really does a nice job. As for efficiency for just getting your word processing done, I have to give it a firm thumbs down. Also, you can really tell this product was not originally developed for Windows because so many of the standard shortcut keys and features are simply not present. I give you the following examples of inefficiency: Ctrl+Z to undo can undo only one time. Unfortunately, I'm not perfect enough to consistently only make one mistake at a time. In tables, the only way you can select an entire row or column is to drag your mouse. If you are in one cell and want to move to the next row but the same column (the cell immediately below), you have to either tab over until you get through the current row or else get your mouse and click the cell you want. There are some buttons on the toolbars that have no equivalent on the menu bar. There is no way to assign your own shortcut keys to various functions you might use often. If you want to resize a graphic, but only know how wide you want it, you can't simply enter the width and then have it calculate the length in order to maintain the same aspect. It's all these seemingly small things that in actuality, when implemented properly, can really increase your efficiency so that you can focus on what's important: writing. For the price of this product, I would really like to see them pay more attention to things that you really need on a regular basis instead of focusing on features you might use perhaps twice or less within a book. They really need to get the basics down first instead of just adding bells and whistles.
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