How to Add a Stylish Text Sidebar Box to a Word Document
Introduction Did you know how easy it is to add a very stylish text sidebar box to your MS Word business or technical document? MS Word comes with a number of impressive page layout features that perhaps you generally don’t expect from Word since it’s not known as a “page layout application” (like InDesign, QuarkXpress,…
Read MoreHow to Create a MS Excel Pivot Table – An Introduction
Creating a MS Excel Pivot Table is very easy if your data is in proper TABULAR LAYOUT FORMAT. Here is a sample table representing the imaginary Atlantic and Pacific region sales of a fictitious fish company. (Click to enlarge the images) As you can see, it’s not easy to look at this data and answer…
Read MoreHow to Slide Sideways into Technical Writing
© Ugur Akinci “Ugur, I know technical writing is a good niche, it pays well, and I want to do it. But how and where do I begin? I have not done it before and any time I apply for a technical writing position they ask me to show what I did earlier…” is a…
Read MoreHow to Format Your Tabular Data Properly for MS Excel Pivot Table
Pivot Table is a great feature of MS Excel. It allows you to analyze your data and find interesting relationships and patterns that may not be so obvious originally. It’s a great data mining tool that’s built right into MS Excel 2010. However, before you can make your data shine through the magic touch of…
Read MoreHow to Create Separate Sub-Documents from an Existing MS Word 2010 Document
© 2011 Ugur Akinci Imagine you have a MS Word 2010 document that you’d like to split into multiple sub-documents, with each new document containing a separate part of the original document’s content. This is how you do it: 1) Open the Word document you want split into sub-documents: (Click images to enlarge them) 2)…
Read MoreHow to Combine Multiple MS Word 2007 or 2010 Documents in a Master Document
© Ugur Akinci Follow these steps to combine multiple MS Word 2007 or 2010 documents into a single document. General steps: 1) Create your individual documents by using as much the same paragraph styles as possible. If they are already created, make sure they share the same paragraph styles as much as possible. This step…
Read MoreShould You Always Write to Communicate? How About Good'Old "Talking"?
© Ugur Akinci OK, I admit the irony upfront: this is a written argument about talking 🙂 But given my daily workload, I unfortunately still don’t have the time to create well-produced videos. So writing is still the quickest way for me to put an idea across. Yet, this is an important issue that also explains…
Read MoreIndoition Honors TCC as a "Top 50 Blog" in Technical Communications
Recognition is always nice. We all do what we do because we’re fascinated with the topic. We love it. Chances are we’d continue doing it even if nobody was aware of it. But still… we’re all human. And a little recognition does not hurt either 🙂 We are happy and proud to share with you…
Read MoreHow to Map Out a Process for a Successful Technical Communication Department
© Ugur Akinci How do you run a technical communication department? How do you make sure your team works on a documentation project as it’s supposed to and pulls the oars in the same direction effectively? One way to do this is to draw (mentally or literally) a Process Map. Here is one offered by Chris…
Read MoreHow to Describe a Step-by-Step Process Visually in MS Word 2010
© 2011 Ugur Akinci MS Word 2010 has these beautiful SMART ART drag-and-drop dynamic images that you can use to express many complex ideas like a step-by-step procedure, for example. There are almost infinite ways to do this but here’s a try: (1) Launch your MS Word 2010. Select the Insert tab on your MS…
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