Autonumbering in Microsoft Word

For my technical publications clients, I use a true desktop Publisher (Framemaker) to produce standalone documentation or to single source to an Online Help standard output such as Microsoft HTML 1.x help; however, many of my clients, for their own internal documentation, use Microsoft Word. Because I am a writer, they naturally assume that I know many things about many different tools, and reach out to me for help, in particular, Microsoft Word and numbering. I could write pages and pages about all the issues with numbering Microsoft Word, and I know that we all have felt the pain of

Read More »

Framemaker for Single Sourcing

[EXCERPT FROM THE AUTUMN 2009 ISSUE OF COMMUNICATOR MAGAZINE] Text Insets and Conditional Text For FrameMaker users seeking single sourcing on a shoestring, Tammy Van Boening of Spectrum Writing offers a solution based on these features. Text insets in FrameMaker offer a way to single-source content by sharing chunks of text across multiple files and books. Text insets are FrameMaker files that you import by reference into another FrameMaker file. The terms used to describe the files used are: Container file (destination file) — this is the FrameMaker file into which you import one or more text insets. This is also the file you use to build the book you are

Read More »

Resizing Visio Swim Lanes

Ah, “swimlanes!” Gotta’ love the term. Ever tried to resize a swim lane in a cross-functional flowchart in Visio and dealt with the frustrations of the swim lane “swimming” all around instead of resizing? Well, there is a way not only to resize swim lanes, but also, to keep all your swim lanes in the same view, even when the Visio diagram extends beyond a single page. (And FWIW, if you try googling this topic, you will find that Microsoft doesn’t refer to swim lanes as swim lanes – the very unfamiliar term of “band” is used instead. And, no

Read More »

Saving You Money

Contact Spectrum Writing to find out how inexpensive great contract documentation can be.