Word To Excel By Way Of HTML
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Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager) 25 February 2009 |
Categories: | • Tools of the Trade |
| Comments: | 2 |
In my day job, I’ve been working a lot with requirements documentation and test cases. These have been huge documents for the last year—hundreds of requirements and associated test cases—that were being maintained in Word and Excel until we finally got access to the client’s requirements management (RM) system.
The Excel document was relatively easy to import into the RM system. Spreadsheets always play well with databases.
The Word document was a pain to import into the system. Word files never seem to play well with anything but Word.
After spending hours cleaning out blank lines and extra carriage returns, heavily stylizing the document, and converting a couple of hundred tables to text, the content still wouldn’t import into the RM system cleanly. It became clear that the test documentation had to be moved into Excel in order for us to get it into the RM system, but the content wasn’t going to be easy to get into a spreadsheet (either). Every heading, list item, and test step had to be in its own cell in Column C—and there was a lot going on with Columns A, B, and D as well.
With some trial and error with a couple of the Save As formats in Word, I found the solution in the least likely of formats: HTML.
By saving the Word document to the Web Page format in the Save As dialog box (NOT Web Page, Filtered or Single File Web Page), and then importing that HTML file into Excel, I had a fairly clean file conversion. To be sure, there were some blank rows that had to be deleted, columns that all had to be resized, and maybe a handful of text paragraphs that didn’t fall into the right column cell (though they were on the right row), but all in all, 4,000 rows of data fell into place rather quickly. Start to finish, the whole process took less than an hour.
Writing text—especially large quantities of it—in a spreadsheet is an adjustment. But if you’re creating text that ultimately has to be imported into a database, the time savings achieved by working from a spreadsheet are well worth the adjustment.
Touch-Enabled Interfaces: New Possibilities for Users and Help Authors
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Ken Schatzke (Webmaster) 13 February 2009 |
Categories: | • Tools of the Trade • Trends |
| Comments: | 1 |
James Bond movies are showcases for cutting edge devices—from the seemingly plausible to the slightly absurd.
In the latest movie, Quantum of Solace, an MI6 agent shows 007 and M the links between a group of bad guys on a digital table simply by touching its surface. This particular device is much closer to reality than you might think. Touch-enabled devices are becoming increasingly commonplace in schools and places of business. As our users are introduced to this new technology we, as tech writers, need to become familiar with it and how it impacts the help and others deliverables that we create.
What are Touch-Enabled Devices?
Touch-enabled devices are electronic devices with touch-sensitive displays. You interact with these devices by touching the display with your finger or a stylus, rather than using a keyboard, mouse or trackball.
While the most common touch-enabled devices today are PDAs and smart phones (particularly Apple’s iPhone), a variety of high tech companies are integrating touch-sensitive displays into desktop computers and similarly sized consoles, boards, tables, and walls. As an example, the company I work for, SMART Technologies, produces interactive whiteboards, public displays, tables, and other devices. Its flagship product, the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, is used in schools and businesses around the world.
Different touch-enabled devices use different technologies to detect touch. Some can detect your finger, a pen, or any other object, while others require a special stylus. Some devices include software that can recognize handwriting, allowing users to write notes and then capture them digitally.
While most touch-enabled devices can only detect a single touch at a time, newer devices can detect multiple touches. As a result, these newer devices can interpret gestures and, in some cases, allow input from multiple users.
Possibilities for Users
From a technical perspective, touch-enabled devices represent a simple evolution of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that we’ve become accustomed to over the past 20 years. Instead of typing with a keyboard or clicking with a mouse, we can now touch a screen to interact with our computers and other electronic devices.
However, touch-enabled devices also represent a significant change in how we interact with the digital world. Educators are using touch-enabled devices, such as the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, to teach to all learning types—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Businesses are using similar technologies to improve employee communication and collaboration. As an example, employees can now record notes on an electronic whiteboard and then save them to a file for later reference rather than having to write them on a traditional whiteboard with the obligatory “PLO” while searching for a scratchpad or laptop computer to capture them.
Multi-touch technology expands on these possibilities further by allowing multiple users to interact with a single device at the same time. Computing no longer has to be a solitary activity.
As the software for touch-enabled devices evolves, interactions in the digital world will begin to resemble those of the real world. Imagine shuffling through the photos on your computer like the ones in your shoebox, or laying out a page on a digital table like tech writers of a certain vintage used to do on drafting tables.
Possibilities for Help Authors
So what does this mean for help authors? Do touch-enabled devices radically change our job descriptions, or is it business as usual?
Currently, the help authors most affected by touch-enabled devices are those working for the companies producing the devices. We’ve needed to expand the traditional software documentation vocabulary to include terms like “press” or “touch” (versus “click”) and show users how to interact with our company’s products. In addition, we’ve had to incorporate more graphical, touch-friendly elements into our help.
Companies that produce touch-enabled devices are creating third-party developer communities with the ultimate goal of fostering broad bases of content and applications for their devices. In addition, the next version of the Windows operating system—Windows 7—will include multi-touch functionality, vastly expanding the software ecosystem for touch-enabled devices. New content and application will require documentation. You may be one of the tech writers that produce this documentation.
In the next few years, we may see more sessions at the Technical Communication Summit and other conferences, more articles in Intercom and Technical Communication, and more discussion on tech writing email lists about documentation for touch-enabled devices. A set of conventions and a body of knowledge will emerge as a result.
In the longer term, help authoring tools and platforms may offer unique features for touch-enabled devices. For example:
- Gestures for invoking help
- New navigation paradigms
- Search boxes that can recognize handwriting
- Help topics that can be shuffled, pinned to windows, and annotated in the user’s handwriting like index cards
What does this mean for lone writers?
It’s not uncommon for changes in technical communication to leave behind lone writers and other writers with limited resources. Content management systems and XML are not always practical solutions for lone writers and small teams, and video and other multimedia are often outside of our budgets.
I don’t believe this has to be true for touch-enabled devices. Using a help authoring tool or HTML editor with an open-source or freeware graphics program such as Paint.NET or Inkscape, you can create simple, effective help for touch-enabled devices. I’ve found a combination of image maps and popup windows is highly effective and can be created with most help authoring tools.
In addition, most of the best practices that we’ve been following for GUI help also apply to touch-based help:
- Make your help a mile wide and 30 seconds deep (to quote Mike Hughes)
- Make help easy to invoke but not obtrusive
- Use a simple and logical information architecture (IA)
So, although touch-enabled devices may be Bond-inspired tech, we don’t need the resources of a secret agent to create help and other documentation for them.
Why Tech Writers Feel Like Bartleby The Scrivener
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Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager) 11 February 2009 |
Categories: | • Working with Others |
| Comments: | 1 |
Sometimes, being a technical writer is enough to make you run screaming for the comparable simplicity of a sales clerk job at Barnes & Noble. Or to a cabin deep in the woods of Western Massachusetts.
Mars Girl, a tech writer in Ohio, wrote about her frustrations with her contract job—which has not, to date, yielded the professional growth and fulfillment she’d hoped for.
I laughed a lot while reading her saga—laughed out of amusement, empathy, and commiseration. In her paragraphs, most any working tech writer will find something they relate to. The stories we all could tell would keep Scott Adams in Dilbert storylines for decades.
Too many folks, not just tech writers, work for companies that seem caught in an endless loop of misdirection and no direction. They have processes and flowcharts that, while detailed, don’t always reflect what’s actually having to be done on a day-to-day basis—many times at management’s own instruction. This Shtikl comic, I think, perfectly illustrates these environments. The sad thing is that the folks who can least afford to be lost are the same ones who are lost—and clueless about the fact that they are.
Similarly, there’s the environments where there actually is a direction—it just seems to take unnecessarily long to get from Point A to Point B. I call it management by cowpath. If you ever read the old “Family Circus” cartoons, you can probably remember the circuituous paths home that Billy would take from school or Jeffy would take from a friend’s house. A Brevity comic strip used a tumbleweed and a flock of sheep for its metaphor; coming to the top of a hill, the sheep leading a flock of hundreds says, while looking at what was in front of them for presumably miles, “Oh brother, we’ve been following a tumbleweed this whole time.” You know you’re headed somewhere. Eventually.
We’ve all either been there—or are there. The best you can do is give it a good college try while simultaneously planning your exit strategy. And, in the meantime, when the exasperation runneth over, perhaps another Shtikl comic’s blunt sarcasm will help remind you that you do have comrades-in-arms. And that you’re not the one who’s crazy.
Some Organizations STILL Don’t Get It
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Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager) 04 February 2009 |
Categories: | • Trends |
| Comments: | 2 |
Not too long ago, Tom Johnson opened some old wounds for me with his post about WordPress’ biggest mistake—the mistake being the dearth of good documentation for WordPress users. It’s another example of how, in 2009, there are still organizations that don’t get the value of having a technical writer on the payroll, either as a staff member or a contractor, to make their products more usable and, therefore, more attractive to users.
Tom wrote: “WordPress documentation is only getting worse. Is there not at least a 100 page manual that you can download (rather than buying a third-party book from Amazon)? Blogger has much more marketshare because it’s an easier platform. WordPress could be more competitive in the marketplace if they simply hired a full-time technical writer to—I know this is shocking—add an online help file directly inside the application.”
I started a rant in his comments section, some of which I’ll repeat here. There’s a faction out there that insists that WordPress (the one you can host on your own site) is easy to use. So—if WordPress is easy, why is there a huge cottage industry of independent geeks and pros who do nothing but set up, extend, and troubleshoot WordPress for everyone else? If it’s so easy, how come some of these people get away, repeatedly, with charging folks $400 or more just to upgrade someone else’s WordPress blog to a new version?
Because it’s NOT.
I’m technically competent. I can replace a motherboard, install a second internal hard drive, set up a wireless network, put up a Web site, even do a little JavaScript (even though I hate it). I can do most anything with good documentation to refer to. But I find standalone WordPress to be obtuse. The scads of WordPress plug-ins make it difficult to tell what you really need, at minimum, unless you want to make learning about WordPress your new hobby—which I don’t. The so-called documentation makes it worse.
Speaking as a professional technical writer, the more complicated your product, the better your documentation needs to be. Speaking as a user and a consumer, the more complicated products and technologies become, the less patience I have with lousy documentation and the organizations who push it out there. Especially when I know how many talented, creative, reliable technical writers are out there and, at the moment, are out there looking for work.
The WordPress documentation needs to be better, as does the documentation for the plug-ins. The widespread use of WordPress demands better user support—a level that can’t be obtained by volunteers who write when they have the time. It requires a dedicated effort by a dedicated staff that works together to create a uniform documentation set. And if WordPress does, indeed, now have $29 million in funding, they can darn well afford a couple of technical writers.
And Here We Are Again…
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Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager) 02 February 2009 |
Categories: | • STC and SIG News |
| Comments: | 0 |
In 2000, with Shari Gray’s blessing, I launched The Solitary Scrivener newsletter with a local crew of volunteers that included Martha Darda (design), Bev Henderson and Rhonda Bracey (copyeditors) and Gretchen Stahlman (Solitary Refinement columnist). It was a quarterly newsletter, distributed in PDF to members, with an ambitious editorial calendar.
Nine years later, I’m incoming SIG Manager, looking for ways to bring together the listserv and non-listserv members of our large SIG. Beyond that, I want the rest of the online world to begin meeting the uber-cool 1172 members that have, over the years, made this SIG one of the largest, most participatory, most helpful communities of technical writers around. Our activities on LinkedIn in the last nine months have introduced us to a lot of lone writers from around the world—folks looking for the kind of support, knowledge, and camaraderie that can be found in the Lone Writer SIG in spades.
As Winnie-the-Pooh would say, tapping his head thoughtfully, “What to do, what to do…”
And so, here we are again. The name is the same, only the format has changed. It’s time to get our collective genius out in the open. Lone writers aren’t merely jacks-of-all trades, although that is an unofficial bullet point on our job descriptions. We’re creative and self-reliant professional writers who have learned how to churn out quality work in all manner of conditions: no help, a little help, a lot of help; no money, a little money, a lot of money; less-than-ideal tools and the tools a lot of folks would sell their souls to be able to work with. We write for print, online, multimedia, mobile, and more—sometimes, all of the above. Between current and past experience, we’ve got most industries covered, including some that would surprise you.
So come one, come all…SIG member, STC member, new online friend. In the words of Liz Strauss, you’re only a stranger here once.