Posts Tagged ‘Technical Writing’
How to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain
How to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain I heard about Dr.Explain only recently. It’s a great layout and text editor for creating all kinds of technical manuals and help files. Especially for dedicated MS Word users, it offers a wealth of options, including the ability to capture automatically-annotated screenshots that even RoboHelp…
Read MoreNew Video Online Course: "Learn Plain Writing Today!"
© Ugur Akinci We are happy and pronounce our newest online video course: Learn plain writing from a veteran writer with over 15 years of hi-tech Fortune 100 experience. Learn the basics of communicating in plain English for maximum success and productivity in your business and personal life. What’s more, if you happen to work…
Read More"Tech Writing Handbook" by iFixit
© Ugur Akinci Here is a “Tech Writing Handbook” for beginner technical writers. It’s very visual, pretty, looks great. Has high eye-candy value. It also covers the basics nicely. http://www.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing However, if you’d like to go deeper and learn more about all these topics while doing exercises, answering quizzes, and writing a User Guide…
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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 MoreTCC Selected "Top 100 Influencer" in Technical Communications for 2013 by MindTouch
© Ugur Akinci Folks, I’m happy to announce that this web site was selected one of the “Top 100 Influencers” in the technical communications field (the 56th, to be exact) in an annual survey conducted by MindTouch.com. We toil long hours every day both to keep up with the latest in our dynamic field and to bring…
Read MoreHow 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 More6 Enterprise PDF Productivity Tools by Adobe Acrobat
Here are five non-free tools offered by Adobe Acrobat that may increase your productivity significantly if you have an enterprise-level office that churns out a lot of large-size technical documents, PDFs, forms, invoices, surveys, reports, etc. on a regular basis. Even though they are not free, they may prove to be cost efficient if you’re going to…
Read MoreHow to Use Acrobat.com for Shared Review of Your Technical Documents
If you have not yet used Acrobat.com for your technical document (PDF) reviews you probably don’t know what you’re missing. The traditional process goes something like this: You send your document to each reviewer individually. Reviewers respond to you individually. Then you try to sift out and incorporate the feedback into the original document while…
Read MoreTop 10 Trends Driving Technical Communication Industry Forward Today
© Ugur Akinci Here are top 10 trends identified by Christian Gravelle, Senior Technical Analyst, and reported by Maxwell Hoffman in an Adobe blog: Trend #1: Adoption of Structured Documents Trend #2: Shift Towards Single Source Publishing Trend #3: Added Complexity in Multi-Format/Multi-Channel Delivery Trend #4: Providing for Mobile Delivery Trend #5: Increased Demand for…
Read MoreHow to Insert a Screenshot or Image Properly in Between Two Steps in an Ordered MS Word List
© Ugur Akinci PROBLEM: You’d like to insert a screenshot or an image in between two consecutive steps in an ordered MS Word list WITHOUT automatically assigning a step number to the image itself. Here is what typically happens: Let’s assume you have the following ordered list: If you hit the ENTER key on your…
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