I’ve often found myself trying to figure out the solution to a problem in Framemaker, RoboHelp, or Word, and eventually wound up on a forum or page where the wonderful Peter Grainge has supplied the solution. His website – http://www.grainge.org/ – is a carefully curated treasure trove of tricks and fixes to get around a million problems tech writers encounter every day – I don’t know why I don’t just head straight there more often. I’d highly recommend you take a peek if you’ve never visited before.
Category: Tech Writing
Creating keyboard shortcuts in Word
When using software, some people like to point-and-click, others like to stick to the keyboard. If you’re in the latter camp, then you’ve probably encountered a handful of menu/toolbar/ribbon buttons with no keyboard shortcut in various pieces of software. Microsoft Word helpfully allows you to assign your own shortcuts to functions with no current shortcut, or to re-assign the shortcut for a function if the default doesn’t fit your reflexes! Continue reading “Creating keyboard shortcuts in Word”
Changing the default Paste options in Word
Remember Clippy? “It looks like you’re writing a letter”? Well, Clippy may be gone, but Word still has his attitude. If Word thinks it recognises a pattern in what you’re doing, it’ll do its damnedest to leap in and lend a helpful hand. For a novice user, this might(?) be helpful; for those of us who’ve been around the block a few times and have very particular notions about what we want, it can be a royal pain. There are ways to curb/tweak Word’s helpfulness, though, if you go digging through the settings. My particular bug bear is when copied-and-pasted text misbehaves, merging itself into existing lists and tables when I don’t want it to, or taking on some wild and wonderful formatting characteristics. Tweaking the behaviour of copy-and-paste in Word is the topic of today’s blog post. Continue reading “Changing the default Paste options in Word”
Broken cross references in Word: Part 3
I work across different machines with different versions of Word. On one machine, when I update the cross references in a document, they lose the character formatting I’ve loving applied to make them stand out from the regular text (blue italic, if you’re asking). This doesn’t happen on the other machines – I’m not sure what the difference is, probably the version of Word or the OS. However, I have found a way to force cross reference formatting to be sticky, and that’s the topic of today’s post. Continue reading “Broken cross references in Word: Part 3”
What does API documentation look like?
How long is a piece of string? If you’re starting a new API documentation project and want to see examples of how other people have tackled presenting the information, head on over to http://www.programmableweb.com/ which catalogs a plethora of public-domain API docs in its directory, as well as providing API-related news articles, and some useful how tos.