I want to learn everything I can learn about MadCap™’s entire suite of products. I want to know MadCap’s software well enough to know what every single menu item does. I want to know it so well that I can tailor it to best support *my* workflow. I want to know it so well that I can work with a team to implement it as the in-house system in a company to make their tech writers’ jobs full of happiness and light.
It began when I took up a contract position for a big company. I’ve never worked for a company that employs 500+ people before, and it’s been an exciting time. The TechPubs staff is working its way through a mountain of projects, and I was brought on to pitch in and shovel.
My time there began with a day-long training session for the team with the fabulous Framemaker and techcomm guru Matt Sullivan. He was brought in to teach us some tips and tricks, answer some Framemaker questions, and give some ideas about how to improve our templates.
At the end of the day, I was grateful for what Matt had taught us, but what really struck me was what a fantastically awesome job Mr. Sullivan has. He gets to go in and help tech writers use their software tools to utmost advantage to keep the focus on the writing, not the typesetting or even the process.
Over the course of the next five months after the training session as I settled into my new position, I had a number of thoughts like these:
- I know I wrote a procedure to do something nearly identical to this three manuals back….now where is it….
- Wait. What was the line spacing after an anchored frame supposed to be again?
- It would really be great if IT could give all my engineers the full version of Acrobat so they could make comments on these PDFs.
- How many drafts have we gone through of this manual?
- I hope I remembered to watermark this preliminary draft that is going out to the field service guy for verification…
- Ugh I have to save the finished version in all these places to make sure people can find it.
- Keeping detailed progress logs on the status of 30+ projects takes up an awful lot of my day.
- I might sacrifice a small kitten for an easy way to map Paste Special > Text to crtl-v in Frame.
Et cetera. You’ll notice that none of these thoughts have anything to do with actually writing. Which is, of course, the problem.
I knew structured Framemaker might help, but not enough. A couple weeks ago I stumbled across the term ‘MadCap‘. And then I finally had a chance to look up the website and see what MadCap Flare was all about.
O. M. G!
This software looks like the perfect solution to every tech writing chore that we all continually have to re-invent the wheel to solve depending on our company’s needs. And then I noticed that MadCap’s headquarters are 13 miles from my doorstep. And then I noticed that they have a training division, and they seem to be on the lookout for people who would like to become an instructor. Needless to say, a number of things came together in my brain.
And so I’m using this blog to annotate my progress through learning and applying MadCap’s software. Hopefully there will be tips and tricks in here, and real comparisons to the Framemaker workflow. I’ve also used RoboHelp in the past, so I’ll have something to say on that front too.
