Book Review: MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Word

After having a great experience reading the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint, my next read was the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Word. Microsoft Word has always been a bread and butter application for me as both a technical writer and freelance writer. Things have been a bit slow lately, so I am taking advantage of the time to shore up some old skills and learn new ones.

The book’s tendency to overlap screen captures became a bit annoying after the first 100 pages. To a novice Word 2010 user, this space saving move could lead to a minor bit of confusion. Take the screen captures on page 143 of 317 (iBook edition) which borders on abstract art not clear and concise communications. While I am on the subject of screen shots, fading out the bottom and right sides of them while certainly a special effect made it almost look like a rendering issue on the screen. There were also a few places in the text where the pagination would cut into the middle of a procedure that was also a bit disappointing considering the state of epublishing tools today. These lapses in production detracted from the overall writing of the manuscript and exercises.

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ProjectPlanner HD for iPad

When I first thought about enterprise uses for the iPad, project management was at the top of my list. When I first held the device in my hands, I could imagine it replacing many paper based tasks and offering an unprecedented level of mobility for tasks like project management. ProjectPlanner HD for iPad helps fulfill that early of vision of mine for the iPad as a project management tool. While it can be easy to argue that iPad project management apps lack the robustness of mainstream project management applications like Microsoft Project and cloud-based apps like Liquid Planner and Zoho Projects, they do offer the features that the non-PMP ninja PMs should find useful.

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My Senior Technical Writer Resume Is Now Updated On Scribd

Will Kelly | Technical Writer | Analyst

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Penultimate & Evernote: Finally Together!

I’ve been using Penultimate since I first got my iPad. Up until now, I had to email my Penultimate note pads to my Evernote account. The email step in my workflow was fine but I longed for Penultimate to get Evernote integration.

Well, my wish came true because of its last release, Penultimate now includes Evernote integration enabling you to send Penultimate notebooks and pages directly from the app into your Evernote account without workarounds like having to email Penultimate notebooks to your Evernote email address.

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5 Reasons Screencasts Annoy Me

eLearning and screencasts in particular seem to be all the rage to the point they are even replacing online documentation for some vendors. This development raises my Irish a bit, because I never think buzzwords and fads should substitute for real support documentation.

While screen casts are great to augment online documentation and customer support sites

Here are 5 reasons screencasts annoy me.

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Does It Take A Community To Raise A Technical Document?

The technical writer profession certainly takes it on the chin sometimes and community based technical documentation – user forums, wikis, blogs, and other social media – is definitely becoming a go to source for technical documentation and training on how to perform technical tasks and thus opening another front for criticism on the traditional role of the technical writer.

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Book Review: MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint

Part of my 2012 learning plan is to build up my SharePoint 2010 skills. It’s a popular platform in my local employment marketplace. I’ve worked with it a lot in the past with a lot of OJT learning. Besides, I am a believer in SharePoint and hope to see it play a part of my near to mid-term professional future. I purchased the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint by Geoff Evelyn from iTunes Bookstore to get the SharePoint fun started.

Using Office 365, I went to work through the exercises in the book using SharePoint Online to help sharpen my skills and learn some features like tuning the site search. While I know this book is written as a study guide for the SharePoint MOS, I am disappointed to see only a bare minimum of coverage on planning a SharePoint site. In my travels, I’ve seen multiple SharePoint implementations suffer from lack of planning and the planning issues drifted across all levels of the project including the stakeholders who were to manage the sites.

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Will Social Media Kill The Technical Writer?

David F. Carr over at the Brainyard on Informationweek.com recently published an article entitled How Social Media Changes Technical Communication and poses the question, “Does all this community activity devalue the contribution of the professional writer or editor?” It’s a good question as more companies look to get more value out of their online and social media presences to support their customer community. However, just like back in the days when the users would measure the value of documentation by the girth of its spine, how social media changes technical communication comes down to the management and positioning of an organization’s technical documentation.

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Book Review: The Secret Life of Word by Robert Delwood

One of the dirty secrets about Microsoft Word in the technical communications world is that you have to put in the time to make it work.  The Secret Life of Word by Robert Delwood from XML Press tackles some of the higher end topics in Microsoft Word like creating macros, find and replace; fields, form fields, and content controls; building blocks; and smart tags in an easy to digest manner that is accessible to even non-Word geek technical communicators.

It uses step-by-step procedures that should help Word newbies to inveterate tinkerers and even experts learn new higher end (and often underutilized) features.

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A Technical Writer In A BYOD World

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement is a hot topic right now as employees look to use their own laptops and mobile devices to get their corporate work done. This breaks the corporate standard model for hardware and software that many technical writers came up on.

This major IT shift offers mobile computing-savvy technical writers new opportunities as organizations embracing this movement make network and technology management adjustments to accomodate employee devices on their network.

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