Best Adobe program for compelling editorial portfolio

Question

Hello,
I am a writer, editor, and all-around communications professional. (In these times, it doesn't hurt to diversify.) I'm consequently trying to put together a portfolio in an easily accessed format (PDF) that showcases writing, editing, and graphic generation samples. What is the best Adobe product to do this? I need something that will let me bring in Word documents while retaining their formatting - and also then let me organize my content in pretty ways, all indexed by a table of contents.
Thanks for any help. I clicked 'Indesign' because it looked the best bet, but if this is the best program for my needs, could you briefly also explain how this program can easily fulfill my needs?
Thanks again for any help.

Answer 1

InDesign may well be the best bet. It's a page layout application that allows you to import a variety of text and graphic formats and arrange them on the page. It also has a Table of Contents feature Driven by paragraph styles (so you may need to add non-printing text labels for non-text items you want to include), and it allows you to export as PDF and SWF, as well as eps or jpeg (which isn't great -- you'll get better results rasterizing a PDF in Photoshop).
Normally when importing word files you do the formatting in InDesign to take advantage of it's superior typography and positioning, but you can certainly preserve as much or as little as you like of what you've done in Word. The exception to this is images you've included in your Word documents. Those should be imported again separately (you can copy/paste them with proper preference settings, but the results are usually not very satisfactory). If you want an absolute copy of the Word document, it is probably best to make a PDF from Word and import that instead.
If you have some more specific questions it will make it easier to give you the information you need.
Peter