Do you use the full power of the Auto-Correct feature?
Moses is chiseling the ten commandments onto a large slab of rock. After many hours chiseling away he finishes at which point God says, “Isn’t there only one “t” in covet? This leads me onto a perennial issue for me: my fingers. If you occasionally have fingers that seem to belong to a different body, you’ll use whatever tools are at your disposal to correct any typographical errors you create.
My tool of choice, RoboHelp, has its own in-built spell checker which can be used to auto-correct any errant “words” that may be inadvertently used. Lots of other applications have a similar feature. So if like me you have a habit of typing “teh” rather than “the”, such a tool can save you loads of time! You just type away in the knowledge that any occasion where your fingers start misbehaving your error will be automatically corrected.
Such powerful tools may occasionally feel a bit underused and like Marvin the Paranoid Android may need their ego boosted. If you are feeling adventurous, why not use them as a form of snippet repository? The RoboHelp snippets functionality works well but it has its limitations. For a start you can’t insert a snippet inside a sentence. Say you have a text phrase that frequently use. At my company we use the phrases “E-WorkBook Suite” and “BioBook Spreadsheet” all the time. You could have these as RoboHelp variables but this means moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse to click and drag it into the topic text. Wouldn’t it be better if you had an entry in the auto correct panel that corrected a text string as it was typed? For example:
- EWBS for “E-WorkBook Suite”
- BBSS for “BioBook Spreadsheet”
To add an auto-correct entry in RoboHelp:
- Locate the cursor inside a topic.
- Click the Tools > Spelling Options menu item. The Spelling Options dialog is displayed.
- Click on the AutoCorrect tab.
- Click inside the Replace field and type the text you want replaced when it is typed (e.g. teh).
- Click inside the With field and type the text you want the typed text replaced with (e.g. the).
- Click Add.
- Click OK.
Values entered are not case sensitive. Oh and if you make a mistake typing the auto-correct values there is not option to edit them. You have to delete the entry and add it again. But then only an imbecile would make that mistake. I should know!
Microsoft Ribbon Hero or Villain?
When I took my first foray into technical writing, my boss used to often answer any questions I had relating to style, format or wording with “How does Microsoft do it?” I’ve always felt this was an easy answer to what can often be a complex question, but it does sometimes provide a solution. However as my career progressed I’ve learned to be more critical of what Microsoft and other companies offer by way of user assistance. Some companies have a lot of resource they can leverage and as a result produce multi-faceted, professional documentation suites. Microsoft is an example of this and as a result their tools and documentation are often held up as beacons of acceptability. The problem is that with acceptability comes expectation and the fact that you’ll never please all the people all of the time.
Never is this more true than the arrival of Ribbon Hero, a prototype game for Word, PowerPoint and Excel 2007 and 2010 users. Yes you read correctly. A game designed as part of Microsoft’s overall user assistance package. It is designed to help boost your Office knowledge by giving you challenges to complete (e.g. calculating the average value on a cell range in Excel). As you complete a challenge, you earn points that go towards your overall achievement score. Tips are available if you get stuck and challenges are categorised to enable you to focus on the challenges that are of most use to you. For example in Word they focus on:
- Working with text
- Page design and layout
- Getting artistic
All well and good. The aim is that by performing tasks and adding a funky, game based element you’ll be more likely to remember what you have learnt. The points add a competitive element as you can share your score with other Facebook users, thereby earning greater bragging rights.
Always one to give things a try, I downloaded the game, installed it and gave it a try. The installation, as you’d expect from a Microsoft product, was a breeze. Once installed, the first time you launch Word, Excel or Powerpoint, the Ribbon Hero add-in is installed a new section is added to your Home ribbon. From there the game is accessible whenever you feel like playing.
On playing the game you are presented with a random challenge that you have to complete. The challenges range from the relatively simple (e.g. applying a style to a paragraph in Word) to ones that could well challenge all but the most experienced users. However the random nature of the challenges, plus their complete inability to allow you to use such things as keyboard shortcuts, made this a frustrating experience. I found myself quickly and easily completing a function only to be told I hadn’t completed it correctly. What is more, I couldn’t carry on until I had. After a couple of really annoying messages to that effect, I gave up.
Summary
It would be fair to say that my experience of Ribbon Hero was less than complimentary. Such a form of user assistance could well prove useful to a younger audience who had little or no experience of the product. However I also like it to allow (or at least give tips) for alternative methods of performing a function. If I had a pound for every time I found someone who was amazed to find out that using a keyboard shortcut was quicker and easier than clicking through a menu item structure, I’d be a very wealthy man. Training aids like Ribbon Hero do nothing to help my bank balance! Ribbon Hero was initially fun to use, and the concept of a game is interesting, but as time went on its point was lost on me. Whilst it does work on one level as a form of user assistance, it does not work for me. No doubt Microsoft will say I am not in the demographic that Ribbon Hero is targeted at, to which my response is , “Thank Christ for that.”
Surprising MS Word Functionality
I recently came across an interesting scenario. A friend of mine was editing a Word document that contained lots of references to Carbon Dioxide but using its abbreviation, CO2. The problem he had was that the abbreviation was written throughout as “CO2”. Naturally he wanted to replace this with the “2” in subscript.
Occasions like this call for a find and replace tool. Word’s own find and replace tool should cope with this right? After all it is just replacing like with like. The problem was that on the face of it, it didn’t. The “Replace” in the dialog does not account for subscript text. You can specify the format of the replaced text, but this applies to entire text string. Therefore “CO2” becomes “CO2”. Not good at all.
It was after a few emails that an ingenious solution was found. Word’s find and replace tool allows you to specify wildcard characters in the replace string. What is more, it has one or two that you may not have come across before. How about “^c”. Believe it or not, this replaces your text string with whatever is currently located on your PC clipboard.
So all that remained to be done was create a piece of text complete with the required subscript formatting and copy this to the clipboard. Once there, you can perform your find and replace but using the “^c” replace string. Genius! As previously stated, this works with anything on the clipboard (e.g. images). If I discover anything else like this about Word I may have to take back everything I’ve ever said about it 
Note: You can discover other find and replace wildcard treats by searching the online help.
I recently came across an interesting scenario. Another Technical Writer was editing a Word document that contained lots of references to Carbon Dioxide but using its abbreviation, CO2. The problem he had was that the abbreviation was written throughout as “CO2”. Naturally he wanted to replace this with the “2” in subscript.
Occasions like this call for a find and replace tool. Word’s own find and replace tool should cope with this right? After all it is just replacing like with like. The problem was that on the face of it, it didn’t. The “Replace” in the dialog does not account for subscript text. You can specify the format of the replaced text, but this applies to entire text string. Therefore “CO2” becomes “CO2”. Not good at all.
It was after a few emails that an ingenious solution was found. Word’s find and replace tool allows you to specify wildcard characters in the replace string. What is more, it has one or two that you may not have come across before. How about “^c”. Believe it or not, this replaces your text string with whatever is currently located on your PC clipboard.
So all that remained to be done was create a piece of text complete with the required subscript formatting and copy this to the clipboard. Once there, you can perform your find and replace but using the “^c” replace string. Genius! As previously stated, this works with anything on the clipboard (e.g. images).
If I discover anything else like this about Word I may have to take back everything I’ve ever said about it
