What is everyone using to make OM's and Pitchbook's? Is InDesign a industry standard, how hard is it for someone to learn?
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Decks - PPT OMs - InDesign. We have a graphics team who works in that software, I've tried to learn so I can tweak shit late at night but it's pretty difficult. Also, having a rookie put together an ID presentation kind of defeats the purpose of having it in ID in the first place...
Any difference between decks and OM's, I just use interchangably
Simple answer is our decks are made through a template in PPT, less design/flash. This way anyone on the deal team can make last second changes before running to the pitch. Analysts to the MDs all know how to use PPT and can make changes quickly/last second. If I catch a mistake in the cash flow at 7am, I can dump a new one in easily. In ID you have to manually enter line by line - it's brutal. No one really cares about flash for a pitch deck, and reality is the valuation is the only thing anyone looks at. As long as the deck is clean, we're good and let the meat/potatoes speak for itself.
OMs are given more time, not as rushed, and have the flashy designs and aerials etc etc. They're also presented to a ton of people and used for marketing simultaneously with pitching the deal to buyers (which is why the effort is put in).
I know plenty of people who keep it all in ID, my team has way too much ADD to do that in a reasonable manner.
Not sure it's a good use of your time to learn, but I found InDesign pretty intuitive.
Lot of good tutorials online, especially if you search for the thing you're trying to do with it.
We use ID for pitchbooks and OMs (which blows because I spent a lot of time honing PPT skills to end up hardly using it). It's looks like it's a standard for large CRE shops and I've heard it's starting to spill into traditional finance as well. I'm about to start learning to use ID, a colleague says he picked it up over a weekend.
Bull fucking shit.
Know if you're going to print it (CMYK colors) or email it (RGB colors). If printing, ask the printer what the bleeds should be. They might even have a .indd template for you.
Learn to set up all the guides, and have your text / image boxes snap to the guides. Satisfying and you don't have to wonder if it's really lined up.
Creating / labeling font hierarchies is very efficient once you get comfortable. Create the main text (ie Times, 12pt), save it as "body," then copy, change it to Times, 16pt, bold, and save that as "headline" and based on "body." Later if you modify "body" it all changes in sync.
If you find yourself asking, "WHERE did that photo go? I was just working with it!"--that layer slipped behind another. Adjust it higher up on the layer menu.
Save often, Adobe products have poor memories for where you were when they crash.
If you start messing around with things on Friday, you'll have something presentable on Sunday evening.
edit: sorry meant to reply to Over-levered
I'm just repeating what head said. I'm sure it takes way longer to actually use it without a bunch of wheel spinning.
HFF
Pour one out for all the boys
I'm still a student but I used InDesign to make a 30 page OM-looking document for a case competition that my team ended up winning last month. Got a ton of complements on how professional and clean it looked which was really nice.
Regarding how long it takes to pick up I would suggest getting a nice project proposal template through adobe and playing around with it. Trying to make something from scratch was real tough without any previous experience with it, but after downloading a template and playing around with all the different components that were already pre-layed out, I was able to pick it up over the course of a few days.
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