When you are a company dealing with your customers’ most valuable personal information, you need them to trust you. One easy way to do this is to have your documentation flawless (or close to it). Also, performing a test run with a small group of people before releasing it to the masses is a good idea. The group of people should be 3rd party users who can find the mistakes you can’t find (since you’ve read and reread the form 40 times and never want to see it again).
Category: Process
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Reading Images
There is an unfortunate trend towards using more images and icons and using fewer written instructions (I like to say “words”). Personally, I don’t think it’s obvious what every icon actually is and what it means, especially when I’m in a hurry to do something.
Whenever I go through a Word document with clients and they ask where a section is, I always refer them to the Document Map. Frequently, they don’t know what it is. Do you know what it is?
In short, Document Map displays the table of contents on the left side of your screen. This is helpful when searching for sections in a document even if there is a table of contents (less back and forth). You just have to make sure your text has heading styles applied to it correctly.
To find it and use it, follow the steps below.
Recently, one of our clients asked us to document the creating forms feature in Microsoft Word 2007. I’ve used Word 2007 quite a bit with another one of our clients and recently got Word 2010 for my personal computer. It seems a little crazy at first but easy once you get the hang of it.
Excitement and innovation aren’t really words that come to mind when you think of “technical writing,” right?
I didn’t think so. As interesting as the profession can be, we often find ourselves filling in the same template for the same type of document over and over again. And while it’s important to make clients happy and follow the standard formats, we must always keep sight of our goals – does our documentation serve its purpose? Does it teach? Does it explain? Does it do these things well?
I recently completed a project to create a document defining the types of functionality and relationships associated with the various database columns and tables in the back-end of a client’s medical billing software. While the project was fun (at least in the sense that I got to work on something nerdy and technical), it was also a sobering reminder about the uncertainty endemic to the world of consulting.
Recently, I’ve been attending lots and lots of meetings. I like talking to people, learning, brainstorming, smiling, etc. One thing that has been pretty consistent though is that people are not doing their “homework”. Teachers didn’t talk about the importance of homework in our 17+ years of schooling for nothing.
As the project headed south in a hurry, a new wrinkle appeared, adding more stress to what was already a stressful situation. My trusty, three year old Windows XP desktop developed a bad case of the crashes. And of course, the crashes came at the most inopportune times: when editing a document to be delivered in minutes or when about to present on the WebEx. Clearly it was just time for a reformat, years of beta builds of software I’ve been documenting and wonky tools for one-off projects leaving their cruft like bad Windows applications are wont to do.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the different ways we organize our content when we create a document. Most of ours have the usual Table of Contents and Index. Some even have a table of Figures. I’ve even put together the odd document where we’ve been asked to include a Table of Database Entities referencing all queries where a given table was used.
Over at I’d Rather Be Writing, Tom explores some of the interesting ways that content is referenced in a hymnbook (for example, by meter for organists) and suggests a few more value-added ways to list the book’s contents.
Have you ever come up with a novel way of breaking down a documents contents?
If you’re located in the greater Atlanta area and interested in technical writing, instructional design and related fields, you might want to stop by Kennesaw State University on April 14. KSU will be hosting a free workshop on 21st-Century Trends in Publishing and Researching in Writing Studies, followed by a Q+A session on publishing processes for scholarly publications.
Both the workshop and Q+A session will be led by technical writing expert Dr. Amy Koerber, editor of the Technical Communications Quarterly journal and associate professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric in the English Department at Texas Tech University.
Registration is encouraged! For more information, check out the Georgia Writer’s Association event page at http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=i6byw7bab&oeidk=a07e3kmu416e936eea6