The official newsletter/blog of CyberText Consulting - technical communication specialists
Updated: 48 min 39 sec ago
Context is everything
One of the problems with Twitter is that you only have 140 characters in which to deliver your message. That’s also an advantage because you have to hone your writing skills significantly.
However, honing your writing often means that the conte...
Creating an eBook from a Word document
These notes are to remind me what I did to create an eBook from a Word document in case I have to create more. They are not step-by-step instructions — they are just my notes from my first foray into creating eBooks.
Some background: I have an ...
Word: Change case after a period
I couldn’t find an easy way to change the case of a lower case letter after a period using Find/Replace (see Matthew’s 25 January 2012 comment on this blog post). My wildcard skills just aren’t sophisticated enough!
However, I did a...
Excel doesn’t allow you to view or specify keyboard shortcuts
One of the things I like about Word is that you can specify your own keyboard shortcuts for your macros and for functions that don’t already have a key combination. Or you can modify those that are already assigned in Word (though I wouldn̵...
Word: Multilevel Appendix headings
One of the challenges I got the other day was to add second and third levels to the existing Level 1 Appendix headings in the client’s template.
After some trial and error, I got it to work. These instructions are for Word 2007, but they should...
Trust is an issue
I read about a handy little app in a computer magazine the other day. So I went to the website, where I watched a video of what it does.
I wanted to find out more about the company behind it, so I went to the About section (which told me NOTHING abou...
Better than winning Lotto
Wow. I work with a health, safety and environment team and we got these pictures from one of the safety guys. It seems this accident happened mid-December 2011 in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and it involved a truck driver delivering oil/...
To cap or not to cap, that is the question
One of the team I work with asked:
Please could you provide us with some guidance on when to use and not to use capital letters. I would expect to use capitals for proper nouns, defined terms in a legal document, position titles, acronyms, symbols fo...
The online world is global, right?
Another post on the inequities of Kindle books available on Amazon…
One of the list members of a tech writer discussion list I’m on, notified the group that The Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing for an Online Audience is only $1.99 in Kindle ed...
Guess they don’t get many complaints
‘Snapped’ at a local restaurant:
Filed under: Humor ...
Just get a $2 throwaway SIM, they said
I’m heading off to the US in less than six weeks, and am taking my smartphone with me. I want to use it as my modem for my laptop where there isn’t free WiFi (yeah, I need to figure out how to do that…), so I need to get a SIM that ...
Adobe pricing sucks
Back in 2008 I had a little rant about Adobe’s pricing model for countries outside the US, specifically Australia. Since then I’ve spoken to several Adobe employees at conferences in the US about this, but have received no satisfactory an...
Fun with road safety signs
Long-time blog reader, client, and good guy, J, shared these photos with me that he took while driving through South Australia on his way back to Perth, Western Australia.
It seems they’re part of a road safety campaign, though it’s a con...
Would you condense your knowledge into a single email — for free?
I helped someone out on this blog a while ago. Because I couldn’t easily diagnose her Word 2003 problem based on the comments on the post, I asked her to email the document to me so I could see what was going on (I rarely do this, but it was ve...
What was Adobe thinking?
What on earth was Adobe thinking when they decided to remove the search from the Adobe Reader toolbar (and Acrobat too, for that matter)?
Someone, somewhere decided that Adobe Reader X (that’s 10 for those of you counting) wouldn’t have a...
Microsoft Lync status sets itself to Busy
I use Microsoft Lync on my client’s computer when I’m linked in to their office via VPN. However, it’s baffled me as to why Lync often changes my status to Busy or Busy — In a meeting without my permission.
I wanted to find ou...
Windows: Get rid of the unused desktop icons message
I think this might only apply to Windows XP as I can’t recall seeing a similar message in Vista.
One of the small annoyances is the little popup that appears every so often telling me I have unused icons on my desktop and do I want to delete th...
Word: Find and replace multiple spaces between words
Your document has varying numbers of spaces between words — for example, 2, 3, 4 etc. spaces instead of just one space. You want to be able to find all multiple spaces after any word and replace them with a single space in one Find/Replace acti...
Word: Find and replace multiple spaces before a number
Your document has varying numbers of spaces before a number string — for example, 2, 3, 4 etc. spaces before a number like 85. You want to be able to find all multiple spaces before a numeral and replace them with a single space in one Find/Rep...
Word: Find and replace multiple spaces after a punctuation mark
Your document has varying numbers of spaces after a punctuation mark — for example, 2, 3, 4 etc. spaces after a semicolon, colon, period, comma etc. You want to be able to find all multiple spaces after a defined punctuation character and repla...
