Ode to our Word Template

Sometimes I just want to squeeze our chapter template like some old friend who has said something cute. It’s got so many redeeming qualities:  hanging indents, keep with next, keyboard shortcuts, macros. And it’s mature, so almost any style you could want is in there. If you do need to add a little something, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump. What?

Seriously, the more I learn about tech comm, the more impressed I am with the woman who developed our template. When we watched some DITA demos a while back and researched structured authoring in preparation for updating help systems, information types and chunking turned out to be old hat. Procedures and reference material? We got that. Strategically-placed context information? Check. Man, were we spoiled.

Well, our template has some parting gifts for us. It just so happens that our Word template has been around and has seen some imports into a help authoring tool. I suspect that was a major function of the design, in fact. Standards for heading verbiage (gerunds for procedures, full window names for window descriptions) help us quickly sort imported content. Consistent organization of information types provides a ready-made TOC that works just fine in the help system. It seems obvious, but I can really tell the difference between our new help systems that folks have built from scratch and those that were composed from imported user manuals.

It’s the organization of information types, or chunking, that I have really relied on to quickly produce help from legacy Word manuals. I think clues like a consistently organized TOC and reliable topic titles help the user to navigate. We can have a good idea of what a topic covers without having to open it. For example; if we didn’t use those gerunds, Add New Record could be menu option rather than a task. 

Similarly, when I use a help system TOC, I expect that all non-expanded nodes in a book are on the same organizational level. Then when I expand one of those, all of the nodes displayed under it are then at a lower level and the same level as each other. If I start out not knowing where to find what I’m looking for, this helps me to be confident that I’ve narrowed it down as I progress. For example, let’s say I’m looking for how to add a Widget. Actually, I’m pretty sure I need to add a Widget, but there might be a better way to accomplish my task. I’m open to the possibility that what I may need to do is amend a Widget. So I start browsing the TOC. If the heading levels are not consistent—if I start drilling down in the Widget section and I don’t trust the organization, I start feeling anxious. Even if I think I have my answer I might have to go back a level and open all the Widget books to be sure I found the best way to accomplish my task.

The plug-and-play TOC has saved me hours–there are so many ways to relate our topics to each other, and it will be fascinating and worthwhile to revisit that organization, but not while I’m learning to use Flare and importing several hundred topics, thank you very much. For these first iterations, I just use the structure laid out in our user manuals.

So I’ll be a little sad to see our old template go. I argued to get it updated (before any of us really tried to build Word targets, we thought CSS would take care of everything) and I’m keeping it around for post-Flare processing. Sooner or later, though, Flare will fix the master page bugs and give us PDFs with bookmarks, and we’ll have all the legacy content imported. The template will be one more extra step that we shed as we race toward ROI. For now, the Word template continues to teach us new tricks.