How Long Should the Appendices of a Technical Document Be?
How long should the appendix or the appendices of a technical document be? This is an interesting question that I haven’t seen discussed earlier anywhere. The question is especially pertinent when the document suffers from “mission creep“, that is, when additional documentation goals get added gradually to the original documentation plan. In such cases, the…
Read MoreHow to Delete Identical Rows in a MS Excel Worksheet
PROBLEM: Your MS Excel worksheet (see below) contains hundreds of identical rows and you’d like to delete them without spending hours to search and identify them. SOLUTION: Follow these steps… 1) Select all the rows in your worksheet, including the column headers (if any). 2) Click and select the DATA tab on the ribbon. 3) In…
Read MoreHow to Cross Electronic Circuit Wires Properly with Adobe Illustrator
In Adobe Illustrator, one of the most frustrating electronic circuit drawing element is two wires crossing each other likes this: However, there is no Illustrator tool to draw the crossing as above, that is, the elegant way. When you use the Pen, Pencil or Line tool, what is produced is this: Ugh! This is not…
Read MoreD.A.R.T Macros for Pharmaceutical and Regulatory Technical Writing with MS Word
The D.A.R.T.(Document Authoring and Readiness Tool) system of integrated MS Word macros does not offer any “structural authoring” functionality like some other Word macro systems do. For example, in my own field, “single s ourcing” is an important feature that saves untold hours by generating different deliverables from the same single source file. However, D.A.R.T. provides formidable standardization for text,…
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