Re: Documents I'd like to see...

[SIANNON -at- VISUS -dot- JNJ -dot- com]

Robin J. writes:
"I'd like to see more documentation that illustrates
potential real-world solutions based on the functionality
of particular software applications. For example, I?d be
interested in seeing how others have used mail merge in
ways other than creating form letters; or how to create a
knowledge base that enables you to maintain, update or
generate an entire policy and procedures manual at the
click of a button; or how (and why) to create an animated
movie using layers in PhotoShop; or creating CBTs in Power
Point."

As someone notorious for pushing software into uses probably never intended 
by the original designer, I can sympathize.  In my last position I 
regularly had to look to online help to not only replace actual training in 
certain software (which was nonexistent at that company) but also determine 
whether something I was trying was even possible; I came to the 
enlightening (and somewhat depressing) discovery that the standard 
installations of much of the common "enterprise" software don't include 
half the helpfiles,...most notably the ones that let you know that such 
functions are possible.

I don't know if such an "expanded usage" guide could ever be included in 
the standard app. docs, but I'd appreciate a few "creative solutions" 
guides for folks having to use specific tools for those common-but-uncommon 
needs/expectations.

A couple examples of such uses I had adventures deciphering:

1.  Situation: One of our strategic analysts (way overworked) had to 
somehow collect, sort and weed through excerpts from any article (magazine, 
industry pub's, press releases, etc.) relating to our industry, and prepare 
a quarterly market assessment from them (with internal citations of the 
source and date for all articles), sorted by three levels of scope 
(international, national and state), and within those levels by 22 
arbitrarily-determined categories (to be presented in a specific 
non-alphabetical order), about 5 of which had up to 4 sub-categories within 
them. Then it had to be attached to the quarterly group/divisional report, 
which was in Word. (This was in addition to all her other work--she herself 
should have counted as 2.5 FTE's in the company headcount, IMHO.) We had 
only the MSOffice Professional package to work with, for tools. The 
articles were collected constantly, so I designed a database in Access to 
store the excerpts, their sources and dates, and assign 
scope/categories/subcategories to them. I wrote a query to ask the date 
range for which to pull articles (to limit it to the current quarter), and 
then hooked that into a Word merge doc that did all the sorting, plus the 
section headers and in-text citations for the articles through an 
extraordinarily convoluted set of IF statements and merge codes.  The 
result was that I'd enter/scan the article excerpts as she fed them to me, 
and once a quarter dump them all to a Word doc she just had to cut the fat 
out of, add comments to, and then append to the existing quarterly report.

2.  Situation: With PDF a non-option, I had to 'port a 900+ page Policy and 
Procedures Manual (read: 2-inch doorstop of pure Administratium), some of 
which was hardcopy, and some of which was in Word, ABC Flowcharter and 
Excel, into an electronic format that had to be easily navigable (read: 
hyperlinked), non-editable by the end user (no 
save-as-and-edit-to-suit-our-needs risk), accessible by all personnel in 
the company through either the intranet or public exchange folders (due to 
regional WAN considerations), but *only* those within the company, as well 
as have all revisions be immediately available, and include all the 
attached flowcharts, tables and forms. I used ForeHelp (then v3.1) to 
funnel it into Winhelp, and posted the compiled helpfile on a secured 
company webserver, with links to it from both locations it needed to be 
accessible through. I got to know the ladies at Forefront's tech support 
department very well during this period, since I helped push their 
developers through two different patches due to some of the weird things I 
was discovering from having to do tables-as-graphics to get everything in.



Shauna Iannone
--------------  -}----
"Trying to get information from a stressed programmer is like trying to 
milk an agitated bat." -- Who, me?   :)

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