One of the world’s oldest text editors is used by 48% of the respondents in 2022

Did you have any questions about whether technical communication professionals are still using the ubiquitous Microsoft Word?

Adobe corporation has answered that question for you in their Adobe Technical Communication Industry Survey 2022.

The answer is a clear YES.

According to this survey conducted with 715 industry professionals from 56 countries (only 35% of them were Adobe users), 48% of them are still using MS Word — even though it’s 8% down since 2020.

Perhaps this is not that surprising a result given the fact that MS Word is estimated to be installed on 1 billion machines across the world, according to this Financial Post story.

What’s on the rise are Adobe’s two premier tech writing tools: FrameMaker (FM) (used by 34%, up 8% since 2020) and RoboHelp (RH) (used by 26%, up 12% since 2020).

FrameMaker is reported to be used by 6,053 companies. RoboHelp, in contrast, is estimated to be used by 800,000+ users across 40,000+ companies, according to Adobe Corp. The number reported by another source is much lower, with 5,163 companies using RoboHelp.

Word vs. FM vs. RH

I have used all three programs for decades, each with its own pros and cons.

If you are writing long documents with a lot of figures, tables, footnotes, numbered lists, etc. then I would go with FrameMaker or RoboHelp. Keep in mind that FrameMaker has a help file export option that creates perfect help files, as good as those that you can create with RoboHelp.

If you are using multiple master pages, Adobe products are again the obvious choice since MS Word does not use master pages that you can easily assign on a page-by-page basis.

But if you are writing simpler documents up to 50 pages with few figures, tables, footnotes, numbered lists, etc. then I would go with MS Word.

If you are writing a single page memo or a CV with a few pages, then again Word is the obvious choice. There is no need to use the high-learning-curve FrameMaker or RoboHelp for such daily short communications.

Other Findings

Related to the continuing dominance of Word, style-based authoring (like the case with Word) is still a favorite way to generate documents: 44% of the respondents said so.

XML or DITA-based structured authoring has made great inroads in the community, with 29% using it. If you are a young tech writer thinking to build a TechComm career, learning XML and DITA would be a good investment.

Small and mid-sized organizations (with less than 500 employees) are home to 54% of tech writers.

Major Challenges

AN interesting section of the survey is devoted to the challenges technical writers are facing today.

Here are the top 5 challenges:

1. Difficulty in maintaining a single source of truth (40%)
2. Inefficient review and collaboration workflows (39%)
3. Difficulty in converting/ingesting existing content from legacy formats (38%)
4. Lack of intelligent content reuse (35%)
5. Challenges in adopting new content formats like chatbots, microcontent and augmented reality (31%)

Review-Related Issues

Every tech writer knows how crucial and difficult is the review process. Writing the documents is one thing; having them reviewed is another.

Here are the top 5 review challenges:

1. Difficult for subject matter experts to provide feedback (21%)
2. Difficult to manage multiple versions of the same document (19%)
3. No easy way for authors to ensure that all the feedback has been accounted for (17%)
4. Lack of real-time visibility into the current state of review process (16%)
5. No easy way for authors to incorporate feedback into the source file (15%)

Popular Publishing Formats

I wasn’t surprised that PDF is the most popular publishing format out there.

Here are the top 5:

1. PDF (82%)
2. Responsive HTML5 (51%)
3. Print (31%)
4. Knowledge Base (27%)
5. WebHelp (20%)

Future of Web

Which functions/services the tech writers are expecting to shift to the web?

Here are the top 5:

1. Review & collaboration (55%)
2. Publishing to multiple output formats (54%)
3. Authoring (46%)
4. Hosting of output content (46%)
5. Online services such as analytics, rating , and feedback (45%)

Definition of Success

How do you measure “success” in technical writing?

Here are the top 5 success analytics:

1. Reduction in customer support calls, chats, or emails (56%)
2. Reduction in time taken to resolve customer queries (48%)
3. Customer satisfaction score (example: Net Promoter Score) (44%)
4. Customer renewal rate (36%)
5. Increase in product revenue (30%)

Future Trends

Just as I suspected, video will be the dominant tech documentation platform in the future.

Here are 5 future trends as envisaged by the survey respondents:

1. Merging video tutorials with technical content (57%)
2. Automating localization and translation (40%)
3. Completely migrating to cloud platforms (36%)
4. Assisted/guided authoring, powered by Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (33%, a trend that will no doubt grow fast in the future)
5. Including usability testing while creating content (32%)

Get your copy of this revealing survey today.