Showing posts with label Fences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fences. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Putting Up Some Fences
From the Techwr-L list:
Fences? What the heck is a software called "Fences"?!? Google, thank you for showing me this: Automatically organize your desktop shortcuts and icons with Fences®!. I downloaded & installed the 30 day trial. Because I was curious, I sought information about other similar products and, again, Google, thank you for showing me this: http://www.topbestalternatives.com/fences/. I'll fudge around with Fences before diving into the depths of alternatives.
I contributed to the thread with this post:
I get the points about being new, etc, but there's also the other side of the coin where 'existing people' (I didn't say 'old' on purpose <grin>) should also be open to a fresh perspective. It goes both ways.
For example, I worked at a hellhole for a short period of time with a senior department member who insisted on using InDesign with no application of styles - as in manually typing the TOC and the leader dots and the page numbers - for a 150ish page user guide. She would print the entire user guide and manually verify the heading in the body matched the TOC. If there was a discrepancy, she would make changes, reprint, and start over. She bragged about staying past midnight to get the user guide done because of that process. Being the problem-solver type I am, I showed her a small InDesign document with headings and a auto-generated TOC. How many hours could be spent on other tasks if the TOCs were auto-generated? I have no idea because she wasn't even open to a fresh perspective. I believe her exact phrase was styles were "too complicated" to implement. I still shake my head in disagreement. You can't convince me that in an InDesign file it is "too complicated" to apply Headings 1 -4 styles to text that is already manually formatted to look like a heading. I call that ignorance.
FWIW, I downloaded the 30 day trial of Fences and am giving it a test drive. So far, so good. Think of it as creating a folder on your desktop, putting files into that folder and being able to see the files in that folder without double-clicking. You can also make the folders roll up, which has already decluttered my Desktop. That's just my observation after a couple of hours of playing with it.
Sent off-list to Bob:
This is what one of my three monitors now looks like. The red boxes are fences that are set to roll up / be hidden until I mouse over them, the green box are icons I don’t have within a ‘fence’, and the purple boxes are fences I created where I am (currently) putting file types and folders.
The fences are just for ease of grouping things. When I view the Desktop in Windows Explorer, I don’t see any fences – all the files are within the “Desktop” folder:
I almost can't believe I am writing this. We hired an internal candidate into a tech writer position. I am trying to mentor/train her. We'll be dealing with Word documents on Windows machines.
I want her to set up a folder structure to manage the files she'll be handling. I suggest Windows Explorer as the "right tool" for doing so.
Instead, she wants to keep everything on her desktop and use a software called "Fences" to manage everything.
I think this is a really bad idea. Am I wrong?
I try to be easygoing and offer "suggestions" rather than dictate things, but am losing patience.
Fences? What the heck is a software called "Fences"?!? Google, thank you for showing me this: Automatically organize your desktop shortcuts and icons with Fences®!. I downloaded & installed the 30 day trial. Because I was curious, I sought information about other similar products and, again, Google, thank you for showing me this: http://www.topbestalternatives.com/fences/. I'll fudge around with Fences before diving into the depths of alternatives.
I contributed to the thread with this post:
I get the points about being new, etc, but there's also the other side of the coin where 'existing people' (I didn't say 'old' on purpose <grin>) should also be open to a fresh perspective. It goes both ways.
For example, I worked at a hellhole for a short period of time with a senior department member who insisted on using InDesign with no application of styles - as in manually typing the TOC and the leader dots and the page numbers - for a 150ish page user guide. She would print the entire user guide and manually verify the heading in the body matched the TOC. If there was a discrepancy, she would make changes, reprint, and start over. She bragged about staying past midnight to get the user guide done because of that process. Being the problem-solver type I am, I showed her a small InDesign document with headings and a auto-generated TOC. How many hours could be spent on other tasks if the TOCs were auto-generated? I have no idea because she wasn't even open to a fresh perspective. I believe her exact phrase was styles were "too complicated" to implement. I still shake my head in disagreement. You can't convince me that in an InDesign file it is "too complicated" to apply Headings 1 -4 styles to text that is already manually formatted to look like a heading. I call that ignorance.
FWIW, I downloaded the 30 day trial of Fences and am giving it a test drive. So far, so good. Think of it as creating a folder on your desktop, putting files into that folder and being able to see the files in that folder without double-clicking. You can also make the folders roll up, which has already decluttered my Desktop. That's just my observation after a couple of hours of playing with it.
Sent off-list to Bob:
This is what one of my three monitors now looks like. The red boxes are fences that are set to roll up / be hidden until I mouse over them, the green box are icons I don’t have within a ‘fence’, and the purple boxes are fences I created where I am (currently) putting file types and folders.
The fences are just for ease of grouping things. When I view the Desktop in Windows Explorer, I don’t see any fences – all the files are within the “Desktop” folder:
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