POWERPOINT QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE MANUALS
POWERPOINT QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE MANUAL
POWERPOINT QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE SOFTWARE

POWERPOINT QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE SOFTWARE

In this article, my colleague and I provide strategies, tips, and approaches we've learned in creating quick reference guides for software documentation projects. The ' almighty thud,' as Martin Fowler describes it, and the subsequent disheartened gloom that usually accompanies the inch-and-a-half thick manual, was completely gone, replaced with a rejuvenated spring-like feeling in the room.Īfter this first response with quick reference guides, I decided to make quick reference guides a regular help deliverable with almost all my projects. They seemed to smile, with a sense of glee, as if having gotten out of some detention. (Previously, when I handed out manuals, people only hefted them in hand, as if trying to guess their weight, or they looked immediately at the page count and sighed.) But with these lightweight quick reference guides, people read them immediately, and not only that, they liked them. It took me nearly a week, in part because I was learning InDesign and had to rewrite the help material in a compressed way, but when I finished and brought the one-page quick reference guide to the next project meeting, distributing a copy to each project member sitting at the table, their reactions surprised me.Īs I handed the one-pagers out to the team members, they immediately started to read them. After finding a design I felt might work (it had four columns in the middle, sandwiched by a top and bottom section), I opened Adobe InDesign and started to duplicate the magazine layout. Without a design background, I resorted to magazines for a layout that might be suitable for condensed help content.

But after a continual pattern of requests for shorter documentation, I had to do something.

POWERPOINT QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE MANUAL

I struggled with these requests, because I had no way to fit the content of my 75-page manual into one or two pages. 'We want the documentation to be, at maximum, no more than five pages,' others would say.

'Do you have a two-page version?' some would ask. After giving them a 75-page manual or larger, the project managers, business analysts, or other customers would ask if I had a shorter version.

POWERPOINT QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE MANUALS

Several years ago, the customers I wrote software manuals for kept coming to me with the same request. Tom's Perspective: The Need for Shorter Documentation Be sure to check out the quick reference gallery mentioned near the end. This is the proceedings writeup that my colleague Ben Minson and I wrote to accompany our presentation on quick reference guides for the upcoming STC Summit in Atlanta. 1.8 Webinar Recording - Organizing Help Content: Breaking Out of Topic-Based Hierarchies.1.7 Quick reference guide slides from the Transalpine Conference.1.6 Starting Points with Quick Reference Guides: Gathering Before Designing.1.5 Documentation Usability: A Few Things I've Learned from Watching Users.1.4 → Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Documentation.1.3 Quick Reference Guides Right Where You Need Them.1.2 STC Presentation this Thursday: 'Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation'.1.1 Quick Reference Guide Formats - Tips for Finding Attractive Layouts.

1.0 Quick Reference Guides: The Poetry of Technical Writing.

Academic/Practitioner Conversations Project.

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A hypothesis about influence on the web and the workplace.

Powerpoint quick reference guide