Invite Retracted

Ha! I didn't want to go to the U.K. for a meeting in the first place!

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I am a liar. I would love to go to the U.K. for pretty much any reason you can think of. I want to see where Black Sabbath hung out. I want to see where The Beatles hung out. I want to see where Led Zeppelin hung out. I am not naive to think that just because I'm in the city where they used to hang out, I would see Black Sabbath (Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler and Ozzy Osbourne) or members of the Beatles (only Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are still alive) or members of Led Zeppelin (only Robert Plant and John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page are still alive) when I went to those cities. Does any of those legends I just mentioned actually still live in those cities? I don't think it's relevant to my point.

My point in writing about all of this is to recap a recent conversation I was in. I talked to someone I know about how I would like to go to the U.K. someday and see those places. I also lamented that Karen would have zero interest in such a trip. I believe that because I relate this fictional trip to the U.K. with when Karen and I were in Long Beach, CA, for WinWriters 2007. While I was excited and giddy when our bus tour took us to the Sunset Strip bars, like The Rainbow and The Whiskey A-Go-Go, I was so excited! To me, that was a highlight of the entire trip - it was truly awesome. While I didn't see any of the legends of the bands that used to frequent those establishments, just being where Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, and Kirk Hammett asked Jason Newsted to join Metallica felt amazing. 

That's why I feel odd to acknowledge that I want to go to those places in the U.K. because, as I said, I know I won't meet any of those musicians; frankly, I'm not sure what I could say to any of them without gushing like an idiot if I did actually see any of them. I'm certain I would be like any other of their millions of fans if, for example, I asked for an autograph. Wow. Just the thought of asking Bill Ward or Ringo Starr for an autograph sends shivers down my spine. I would ask for an autograph from any of the others, especially Ozzy Osbourne, but Bill & Ringo would be my targets.

Before I move on, can you imagine if those musicians got in the same room together and just jammed? That would be something to hear! Of all those musicians, only the original members of Black Sabbath (Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler and Ozzy Osbourne) are still alive . . . and they don't play music together anymore. How sad!

Anyways, I'm okay that the invitation was retracted 53 minutes after I received it - I so do not like making anyone feel disappointment.g

Read My Mind!

While I agree with the solution Oliver Kauk makes in the second paragraph, I couldn't help but chuckle when I read the first paragraph. My 20+ years of working as a technical writer has taught me that a tool does not "know" that you've entered data by typing into a field until you somehow 'submit' or 'commit' that data to the software's database or storage mechanism. Prior to that, unless there's some code that is tracking how many keystrokes you have made - which is different from when you enter text in a field that has a limit on the number of characters (like if you are writing a tweet using Twitter), my understanding is that there is no way for the software to know if you have accessed a window within the software and entered 1 or 4000 characters.In Oliver's case, he has entered data in a field and pressed the Escape key without committing that data to the Cherwell database.

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To be crystal clear, I do agree that you should get a warning message that you have unsaved changes. For example, within Blogger, I clicked the Close button and saw this warning:

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I think a similar message would easily resolve what Oliver has raised as an issue.

Fortunately, Not Me!

Yesterday, at work, it was announced that there had been layoffs in our department. I admit I worked with a bit of PTSD creeping into my mind, considering that it was 861 days (2 years, 4 months, 1 week, 3 days) ago when I was laid off at Pearson. Damn, that was an awful Tuesday morning in January 2016, as I sit here and shudder.

The past, though, is the past. Today is my 799th day (2 years, 2 months, 1 week, 1 day) of working here. I have a meeting in a little less than 1 hour about Knowledge Management. It is going to be discussing whether we can link RoboHelp output (HTML5) to Cherwell. I am so blessed to work here!

In related news, for a few months now, I have read the writings of Nick Corcodilos and with that in mind, I liked this article: Glassdoor Salary Data: Worse than useless

The Red is Reality While the Green is What SHOULD be Reality

Because I am trying my best to not have information about single sourcing documentation in multiple places, the text & graphics that were in this post are no longer here - they exist only on the Single Sourcing Rant page.

In My Pursuit of a Backup Solution

Was reviewing this product - https://www.paragon-software.com/medium-large-business/protect-restore/features.html - and looked at this PDF: http://download.paragon-software.com/doc/PPR-ENG/Protect-and-Restore-full-features.pdf. I noticed it was created in InDesign. It made me wonder if the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa pulled their head out of their bum and started using InDesign like a real technical writing tool. Of course, if I was still there, I'm fairly certain I would have ditched InDesign in favor of RoboHelp to write their user guides for their software. Even the documentation that had to be translated into multiple languages likely would have found a home in RoboHelp.

Did I mention I really like RoboHelp?

Speaking of RoboHelp, I had a great meeting yesterday with a steering committee (with Senior Directors in attendance, including my manager's boss) about Knowledge Management. I spoke about snippets during the meeting and rattled off statistics about 8 sample documents I have been working with which had 121 paragraphs & 62 graphics. Of the paragraphs, 58% of the content existed in multiple documents. Of the graphics, 55% of the screenshots existed in multiple documents. What I need to do, for the next meeting, is to create a proof of concept that I can show to the attendees. I think talking in generalities is not nearly as powerful as showing a demo of how I would use snippets in our Knowledge Articles that will be our Knowledge Repository. I wrote about snippets and Cherwell's lack of support for snippets on the Single Sourcing Rant page, if you want to read more. I walked out of yesterday's meeting pleased with myself, for explaining why snippets are awesome, as well as hopeful about the way I want to create Knowledge Articles for our department could be adopted.

List of KB Sites

https://www.knowledgebase-script.com/live-examples.php

Nice Typo in the Title

Editor's Note: Clicking the in this post will reveal the true identity of prhmusic so click with caution. It's kind of like a magician revealing how the rabbit appears in the hat. Once you know, you can never 'not' know how it is done.
This is the beginning of a discussion on LinkedIn that I began about Knowledge Management. Apparently, I need to learn how to spell "Knowledge" as I didn't spell it correctly in the title.

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2066490/2066490-6377928262047264771

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I really really want to use RoboHelp instead of Cherwell for our Knowledge Repository. I have spent most of this week analyzing 8 documents that are likely candidates for the Knowledge Repository. I have identified the following:
55 unique + 66 duplicate = 121 Text     45% unique graphics, 55% duplicate graphics
26 unique + 36 duplicate =  62 Graphics 41% unique text, 58% duplicate text

That's awesome for my case to use RoboHelp instead of Cherwell! 

My co-worker and I had a Breakthrough - It looks like this

Teresa, my co-worker, and I have been using the same meeting room each week when we meet to plot out how we want the "ideal" Knowledge Article workflow to look like. The meeting room walls are a whiteboard and so, for a few weeks, at each meeting, I've filled the walls with our ideas using dry erase markers in multiple colors. I started writing on the left wall as you walk into the room - it is about 98% covered. Until yesterday, I've left the right wall untouched. Now, it looks like this:

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I have a lot of other pictures I took with my cell phone of the wall and Teresa has meticulously documented what I've wrote on the walls in a MS Word document. It's slowly becoming the Knowledge Management strategy for our department.

Why Microsoft Gets a Bad Rap for their Online Help

First, a picture, then an explanation.

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Now what did you just look at in the above picture?

1. I wanted to delete a style.
2. I saw an error message with a Help button. I clicked Help
3. I see the Word Help window and instead of showing me information even remotely related to styles, the window includes the text Results for "", which indicates that there was no parameter passed from the Help button to the help system. Thus, the first result I see in the list has NOTHING to do with deleting a style!

That is so wrong and why I, as a technical writer, can't justify a suggestion about how to access Knowledge Articles through our instance of Cherwell because I don't want to follow "the Microsoft standard" due to seeing shit like this!