STS Blog

As I learn more about Office 2007, I’ll have plenty of specific tips for you. Until then, I want to provide the best advice ever given to me: Don’t be scared.

Our familiar Word toolbars have been replaced by this:

At first glance it is chaotic and cluttered. Nothing is where it should be. We have no idea what to click. Worse yet, we have no idea what to expect when we actually click something. At times like this, when we are surrounded by the unfamiliar, it is important to remain calm.

If we immediately rush ahead and try to make Word do our bidding, we’re just going to frustrate ourselves. However, if we take a deep breath and examine our surroundings, familiar icons will begin to stand out.

The first thing I’m going to do is mouse over a button I recognize…

…and be pleasantly surprised. Now, not all of the tips you’ll find are as thorough as this one, but many of them are.

Don’t bother typing anything at first. Just take some time and explore the interface. As with all things in life, the more you interact with something, the more familiar it becomes.

1i

P.S., Be sure to note that UFO in the top left is actually a button!

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When I broke into this business in the early 80s, my first gig was as a technical writer for a large electronics manufacturer. I had been placed there by a broker (who received a percentage of every dollar I billed). Thus, when I told my manager at the electronics manufactuer that I had nothing to do and that he was wasting his money (development on the project hadn’t started yet), the broker was not terribly happy with me. In fact, he threatened not to pay me for the time I had been there.

From this unpleasant situation I realized that there was an accountablity issue. I felt accountable to the person I was working for — the electronics manufacurer — not the broker who hadn’t a clue what I was doing so long as I continued to bill. And it was at that moment that I decided that when I had my own company, my writers would be full time employees of my company, be accountable to me, and I would be accountable to my clients.

Over the years, this model has worked well. While scheduling can sometimes be a nightmare — making sure everyone has billable time all the time — at least I know and can assure my clients that if there’s nothing for us to at a particular time, we don’t need to be there and come back when there is something to do. This has worked well for my clients (for obvious reasons), for my writers (they feel like they’re always productive) and for me. Mostly, though, it’s just good business.

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If ever there was a typo so vile and loathsome that it deserved its own domain, this is definitely it.

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Apparently Adobe has gotten serious about changing their mind about giving up on the technical documentation market. After reviving RoboHelp in response to MadCap’s success with Flare, they’ve just now come out with a new version of FrameMaker, the first release since FrameMaker for the Abacus in 208 B.C.

Among the exciting new features in FrameMaker 8: Support for Flash. Which is great, because I’ve been looking for a way to get animated banner ads into user manuals for years.

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Studies have shown that people can remember between five and nine items at a time depending on the information. By using a range of adding two or subtracting two, we get the number seven.

In general, people can only remember seven things at one time. When writing instructions and steps, we should keep the number seven in mind. Try to keep instructions to seven steps or less. If a set of instructions is long, try breaking it down into groups instead of one long list of steps.

It is also good to keep sentences 21 words or less. If a sentence looks complex, it probably is. Do not force the reader to read a sentence more than once to understand its meaning. Studies show that people retain information from sentences no more than 21 words. Can anyone guess what 21 is divisible by?

Here are links to more information about the studies and memory:

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/learning/memory.html

http://www.sheridanc.on.ca/~sherman/rap.dir/weeks1to4/Cutfog.html

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With so many image formats to choose from, how do you know which one will work best for your documentation? Here’s a quick primer:

GIF
GIF images are usually very tiny - they are great for web graphics. Also, the GIF format supports transparency, something that also makes GIF images good for web applications (since it makes it easy to place irregularly-shaped images on top of patterned backgrounds). You can also create animated GIFs, which you can use for web applications as well as PowerPoint slides, but be careful - like the blink tag, animated GIFs can be very annoying when they are misused or overused.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Here are a few links to some interesting things I’ve read recently that might be of interest to fellow technical writers:

• Web Worker Daily recently published an article on underused (or maybe under-publicized?) Google features. My favorite is Google Alerts - I can have Google send me an e-mail whenever it generates any search results related to a particular keyword. It seems like it could be a handy tool for tracking recent developments related to a certain news story, product, or industry.
• The Photoshop Blog has a really nice posting which links to tutorials for creating several types of text effects using Photoshop or a comparable image editor. This looks like a good place to brush up on some image editing skills…
• DrawAnywhere is a cool web-based tool which lets you draw simple diagrams and charts using nothing but a web browser and an Internet connection. This is something that could really be convenient for any technical writers that need to create quick flowcharts or diagrams while working far away from any licensed copies of Visio.

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I have recently developed some software instructional videos for one of our clients using Camtasia Studio. When developing these videos, I noticed a glitch in the program and I thought I would share what I found and how I managed to work around the error.

Issue - Sync problems in published video
After editing the video and adding callouts, zooms and voice-over audio (recorded separately), I noticed that my rendered video files did not sync with the audio. Callouts would occur after the video had already moved past the point they were supposed to start. The entire video ended before all audio and callouts had occurred. I did not notice any of these issues in the editor, only after I published the video files.

Discovery / Work Around
After much searching, it turned out that the frame rate of the rendered files was 15. Apparently my audio files and some other video components were running at a 30 second frame rate. I have since started explicitly specifying a 30 second frame rate in the output of all my published video files in Camtasia. This seems to solve all of my sync issues.

My research indicated that Camtasia Studio has fixed some bugs related to sync problems in recent releases of the Camtasia Studio software. The version I was using is Version 3.1.0.

I hope this helps anyone finding themselves in the same predicament.

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