At long last — the “Technical Writing and Editing Online Course” that I’ve been working on for six months is now available on Udemy platform!

This has been a great learning and development process because most of such platforms are geared towards teaching and learning computer languages.

A [...]

Every computer and device on the Internet has an IP (Internet Protocol) machine address consisting of four groups of numbers separated by a dot/period. This is very much like a phone number; a number that identifies a specific machine.

General format is: zzz.yyy.xxx.www where each letter represents [...]

Unfortunately, even after you learn to author in DITA XML, after learning to create the format instructions, after finding a translation agency that treats your new topics the way they deserve, you are not done. No time for a victory lap. Time to engage your output strategy.

Pull-out quotes are excellent to emphasize certain part of the document text.

MS Word 2010 renders the insertion of pull-out quotes a breeze, thanks to the extremely versatile “Insert Text” function.

Let’s say we have the following sample text:

Select and copy your pull-out text. For example:

Imagine you have the following document:

You would like to insert TABLES to this text but number them starting with the multilevel number of the section they are in.

For example, you want the tables placed in section number “2″ as “Table 2-a”, “Table 2-b”, “Table 2-c” and not simply [...]

Some documents like software or legal documents require multilevel numbering of headings that look like the following:

Imagine you have a Word document like the following:

To attach a multilevel number to each heading, first make sure all your headings are assigned one of the heading styles in the style set [...]

Here is a short, clearly written, and important work on variation that should be read by all technical communicators who would like to understand the meaning of time-series data and how to interpret them: Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos

The author Donald J. Wheeler is a statistics professor, long-time SPC [...]

Here is an uncomfortable fact of technical document management: as much as we’d like to base our decisions on hard evidence and numbers, we still make a number of judgment calls that rest on nothing more than a seat-of-the-pants “this feels okay,” this sounds just right to me” or “I’m not not [...]

Did you have a column of numbers in MS Excel that looked ugly like this:

You can have a really nice looking column of numbers by centering them on the DECIMAL POINT — even if some of them do not have a decimal point.

The first thing to do is to [...]

Yours truly presented a workshop this past Thursday (April 18, 2013) in Falls Church, VA about  ”How to Publish on Amazon Kindle.”

The attendance was great and I was very pleased to share all I’ve learned about how to write for and publish on Amazon Kindle platform with my fellow technical writers. Those [...]