Posts by Ugur Akinci
How to Insert a Pull-Out Quote into a MS Word 2010 Technical Document
© Ugur Akinci Pull-out quotes are excellent to emphasize certain part of the document text. MS Word 2010 renders the insertion of pull-out quotes a breeze, thanks to the extremely versatile “Insert Text” function. Let’s say we have the following sample text: Select and copy your pull-out text. For example: “This ebook focuses on how to write the…
Read MoreHow to Apply Multilevel Numbering to MS Word Tables
© Ugur Akinci Imagine you have the following document: You would like to insert TABLES to this text but number them starting with the multilevel number of the section they are in. For example, you want the tables placed in section number “2” as “Table 2-a”, “Table 2-b”, “Table 2-c” and not simply as…
Read MoreHow to Apply Multilevel Numbering to a MS Word Technical Document
© Ugur Akinci Some documents like software or legal documents require multilevel numbering of headings that look like the following: Imagine you have a Word document like the following: To attach a multilevel number to each heading, first make sure all your headings are assigned one of the heading styles in the style set you…
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How to Manage Signal Versus Noise in Technical Documents
Introduction Signal versus noise is an interesting and important issue in technical communication. Here is an uncomfortable fact of technical document management: as much as we’d like to base our decisions on hard evidence and numbers, we still make a number of judgment calls that rest on nothing more than a seat-of-the-pants “this feels okay,”…
Read MoreHow to Line Up Numbers on Decimal Points in Excel
© Ugur Akinci Did you have a column of numbers in MS Excel that looked ugly like this: You can have a really nice looking column of numbers by centering them on the DECIMAL POINT — even if some of them do not have a decimal point. The first thing to do is to define…
Read MoreHow to Test the Map IDs of a RoboHelp Context Sensitive HTML Help File
© Ugur Akinci All context sensitive help files have each individual help topic assigned a Map ID number. The programmers code that ID into the application so that when a user presses the F1 button in a topic screen, the application reads the Map ID of the topic and displays the correct topic that corresponds…
Read MoreHow to Configure Line and Page Break Options for MS Word Documents
Click the lower-right corner of the Paragraph pod on the Home tab: This will display MS word’s Paragraph dialog box. Click and select the Line and Page Breaks tab for the following line and page break options: Select Widow/Orphan control check-box to prevent MS Word from splitting up a paragraph such that a single line ends up displayed at the top of…
Read MoreHow to Change the Page Orientation of a MS Word Document Page
© Ugur Akinci Let’s say you have a portrait-orientation MS Word document but you’d like to insert a LANDSCAPE orientation page in the middle of your document to accommodate a map or a wide table. Since MS Word does not support the “master pages” paradigm, you cannot just switch from a Portrait page template (master page) to a Landscape page…
Read MoreHow to Create a New Paragraph Style in MS Word 2007 and 2010 by Selecting Edited Text
© Ugur Akinci You can create a new paragraph style in MS Word 2007 and 2010 by selecting an edited paragraph and assigning its style as a new paragraph style. For example, let’s say you’d like to have all your examples display as indented text, with italicized fonts. Let’s say this is the paragraph we’d…
Read MoreHow to Extract Text or Numbers from Character Delimited Cell Content in MS Excel
© Ugur Akinci Character-delimited data is fairly common. Here is an example: 100&4657&23&495&103 or Apple$Pear$Orange$Cherry$Grapes Imagine having a MS Excel table with cells populated with such content. How would you separate the text or the numeric values and post them under their own separate columns? Here is an example of some imaginary data about SEASONAL…
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