October 2010 – The Logical Blog

October 29, 2010

Acrobat: X-citing News!

by David R. Mankin

Acrobat X has been announced by Adobe! There's something exciting in the Adobe world, and it's about to hit the shelves of your favorite software store. Adobe recently announced the pending release of the Acrobat X family of software. There are some really exciting changes and improvements over Acrobat 9. The most noticeable will be Acrobat X's user interface. It is uncluttered, and always gives the document its due focus instead of banks of toolbars and palettes.

PDF Portfolios are more usable, beautiful, and cooler, if you can image that! There will be improved scanning results, better OCR, integration with SharePoint technology, a better in-browser PDF experience and an Action Wizard that will blow you away with its power and flexibility.

You'll do less fishing for tools in this new release, thanks to a customizable Quick Tools area to the right of the view panel.

Exporting to Excel and Microsoft Word has been super-enhanced. There's more–MUCH more. To see a complete features list, click here.

The entire Acrobat family is being upgraded. Reader X will be free, of course, and there will be three other Acrobat X products for sale: Acrobat X Standard, Acrobat X Pro and Acrobat X Suite. Current Acrobat owners will be eligible for a special upgrade price. Although the exact release date has not been stated, you can expect this new version to hit the streets very soon.

I am very excited about getting my hands on Acrobat X, and bringing it to you in the classroom as soon as possible. In the meantime, sign up for one of my live, online Acrobat classes and learn about the cool stuff you can do with Acrobat 9.

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About the author: David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. And if that wasn't enough, of course David is an Adobe-certified expert in Adobe Acrobat.

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October 27, 2010

Microsoft Word: Customize the Status Bar

by Jennie Ruby

When you are using Track Changes in MS Word, sometimes you need to turn the tracking off for a second to make some minor correction "off the record" and then quickly turn the tracking back on. But after a trip to the Home tab, or the Insert tab, or elsewhere to make an untracked correction, you have to return to the Review tab to turn Track Changes back on. Now if you are a Track Changes guru, you have probably memorized the keyboard shortcut: Control-Shift-E. But if you don't have the keyboard shortcut in your head, there is another shortcut that may come in handy.

In Word 2003 (and earlier versions), grayed-out shortcuts line the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Among them is TRK, a shortcut for turning Track Changes on and off. That shortcut also serves as an indicator as to whether tracking is currently on or off. In Word 2007 or 2010, the Track Changes shortcut appears at first to be absent, but if you right-click the status bar, you get a menu in which you can choose to add the Track Changes shortcut. Once that tool is on your status bar, you can turn Track Changes on and off without a trip to the Review tab. The shortcut also indicates whether Track Changes are currently on or off, so that you don't have to make a test change to check.

Other shortcuts you might find useful on the status bar are Section, Word Count, Proofing, and Macro Recording. Some of these are present by default, others must be selected from the right-click menu, but each of these tools is more than a simple indicator.

Click the Section shortcut, or any of the position shortcuts, and the Go To dialog box opens, allowing you to go to any section, line, page, or position in the document. Find and Replace tabs on the Go To box add even more convenience in finding a specific location.

The Word Count shortcut does more than tell you the number of words in the document. If you click it, it produces full statistics about the number of pages, words, characters, paragraphs, and lines. The Proofing shortcut will take you to the next red- or green-underlined spelling or grammar problem in the document. The Macro Recording shortcut allows you to start and stop recording without a trip to the View or Developer tab.

Word is such a workhorse program for most of us that just a few shortcuts can result in significant time savings and better productivity. If you use Track Changes, consider coming to one of my half-day, live on-line classes. In three hours you may find enough shortcuts and new skills to save yourself days of work over the course of a year.

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Are you an eLearning developer who has been tasked with creating an effective voiceover script? If so, consider attending my Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts class. I also teach the Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts class.

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About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007" to her credit. She is a publishing professional with more than 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.

October 27, 2010

Adobe Builds Rome in a Day

Jackie Dove of Macworld.com introduces you to Project Rome, a new all-in-one content creation and publishing application targeted to consumers, small businesses, and educators. According to Dove, "This product lets users produce printed, electronic, and Web-based documents featuring integrated graphics, photos, text, video, audio, animation, and interactivity. The cross-platform application is available both as an Adobe AIR desktop program and as a browser-based Web service. Project Rome offers output in formats such as PDF, SWF, JPG, PNG, SVG, or FXG or Web files for either an Adobe or third-party-hosted Website." You can learn more about Project Rome on the Macworld site.

October 27, 2010

Adobe Captivate & Soundbooth Integration

Adobe's Mukul Vinay Lele has written an article that covers the Captivate to Soundbooth to Captivate workflow. According to Vinay's article, Adobe Captivate 5 contains a number of new workflows that will enhance a Captivate developer's productivity. For instance, the "Edit With Soundbooth" option allows developers who own the eLearning Suite to take audio content from Captivate into Soundbooth, modify the audio by applying filters and get the changes into Captivate with a single click." You can find the full article on the Adobe Captivate blog.

October 26, 2010

Adobe Captivate 5: Shhh! The Password Is…

by Kevin Siegel

A simple-to-use but often overlooked Publish Setting is the ability to assign a password to published Captivate projects. Once a password has been assigned, the eLearning lesson will not begin to play until the correct password has been entered by the eLearning student.

To assign a password to a project, open a project and choose File > Publish Settings.

From the Project group, select the Start and End preferences.

Select Password Protect Project and then click the Options button to open the Password options dialog box.

Type a password into the Password text field. You can further control the messages that will appear on the Password page by typing the desired messages into the Message, Retry Message and Button Text fields. When finished, click the OK button for both the Password options dialog box and the Preferences dialog box.

Adobe Captivate 5 Password Options

Preview the project and the first thing you will see is the Password screen. You can test the Retry message by typing an incorrect password into the Password field. Notice also that until a correct password is entered, the lesson's playbar is hidden, preventing forward navigation.

Password screen

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate 5? We are now offering Beginner and Advanced classes, as well as a half-day course on Advanced Actions. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend the classes.

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October 26, 2010

Adobe RoboHelp 8: One Publish, Multiple Servers

by Kevin Siegel

I received an email from a RoboHelp developer who was faced with a daunting task. He needed to post a copy of his generated RoboHelp project to three servers within his corporation. His RoboHelp project was large and consisted of thousands of topics, tens of thousands of images and other assets.

The process of copying and pasting the contents of his generated layout (he was generating WebHelp) wasn't a difficult chore, but it was time-consuming. After generating his Help System, he went into the SSL (Single Source Layouts) folder within the project folder, copied the generated Help System files and pasted them onto the first server. After the process was complete, and assuming there were no read/write errors, he went to the next drive and pasted, and so on and so on.

The Help System consisted of such a large number of files, it took a long time for the copying process to conclude. And due to server limitations, he couldn't simply paste the files onto all three servers at one time and walk away. In essence, he had to babysit the publishing process.

Compounding the problem was the fact that when he made even simple changes to any of the topics within the Help System and re-generated, he had to go through the copy/paste routine all over again.

The developer was hoping for a better solution, one that would give him his life back. And I was happy to introduce him to multi-server publishing.

You can easily create multiple servers within RoboHelp and publish your projects to those servers, one after the other. You can accomplish this publishing feat with a minimum of clicks, and without having to babysit the process. What could be better? Actually, plenty. If, down the road, you make changes to any of your topics, regenerate and then republish, only the updated content will be added to the servers.

Here's how you can publish one project to multiple servers:

Show the Properties of either WebHelp or FlashHelp.
Click the Next button until you end up on the last screen (the Publish dialog box).
Click the New button to open the New Destination dialog box.
If you are planning to drop your Help System files on a drive within your own network, select File System as the Connection Protocol.
Give the server any name you like.
Type or browse for a folder on your server where you will be publishing your project and then click the OK button.
Click the New button again and create as many destination
servers as you need.
When finished, click the Save button.
Generate your layout and, when the Results screen appears, click the Publish button.

And Bam! Your Help System files will be published to all of your servers (anywhere in the world), one after the other. And if you want to get totally knocked off your feet, go ahead and make a change to any of your topics. Then generate and re-publish. You'll see that only the files that have changed (and a few support files) are re-published.

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Need to learn RoboHelp… and fast? Join my live, two-day RoboHelp class later this week.

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October 21, 2010

Featured Online Classes

Mastering Track Changes in Word 2007

Track changes can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Make sure this powerful tool is on YOUR side.

In this half-day class, you will learn how to

Mark up a document with Track Changes
Compare two versions of a document
Combine multiple reviewers' comments
Change the formatting of tracked changes and balloons
Know when "Final" does not mean final
Guarantee that all changes have been removed or accepted
Protect a document when sending it for review
Set up a logical procedure for reviewing with tracked changes

Instructor: Jennie Ruby

Click here to learn more or to sign up.

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Upgrading from Adobe Captivate 4 to Adobe Captivate 5

Adobe Captivate 5 was recently released by Adobe Systems. Join us for a limited-engagement, live training event and learn how to use the new Captivate features–and where the old Captivate features you've grown to know and love have gone.

Lessons Covered During this 3-Hour Class:

Upgrading legacy Captivate projects to Captivate 5
The new Captivate 5 interface (Workspaces)
Working with Object Styles and Creating Custom Styles
Creating Project Templates and Master Slides
Enhanced collaboration via Acrobat.com

Instructor: Kevin Siegel

Click here to learn more or to sign up.

October 21, 2010

Writing & Grammar: On Teaching Grammar and Soccer

by Jennie Ruby

Teaching or writing training materials can sometimes feel like making students memorize a rulebook: "Never place a comma between the subject and the verb." "The verb must match the subject in person and in number." And so on.

When teaching grammar, for example, I can sometimes hear myself sounding like a soccer coach teaching beginning soccer: "The game starts with a kick-off." "Only 11 players are allowed on the field at one time." But in grammar teaching, as in soccer coaching, and probably as in every kind of training, there are different kinds of rules.

The first kind of rule is one that is so self-evident you seldom have to teach it, because it is common knowledge in the population you are teaching. For instance, almost no one in my classes needs help fixing what is wrong with this sentence:

Dog the bit bone the.

It is so obvious how to fix this that students always already know it: the word the goes before the noun, not after it. You don't even have to actually state the rule. Similarly, anyone who is barely familiar with soccer knows you have to kick, not throw, the ball (unless you are the goalie or you are doing a "throw-in"). I just read an entire web page claiming to give the 17 basic rules of soccer, and the rule about mostly kicking, not throwing, the ball was not even mentioned.

A second kind of rule is an "official" rule. These are the kinds of rules codified in a rulebook: "a soccer ball must be between 68 and 70 centimeters in circumference and have a weight between 410 and 450 grams," or "the indefinite pronoun one is always singular."

A third kind of rule is not so much a rule as it is advice: "Don't start a sentence with based on"; "lock your ankle, hit the ball with the leather of the front of your shoe, and power through." These last rules might better be called best practices. They describe the best way to achieve something, but if you do it wrong the only penalty is that you are less likely to succeed–in creating a grammatically correct sentence, or in kicking the ball a great distance accurately.

Recognizing these different kinds of rules can help keep training materials from sounding too rule-bound, and the "official" rules can be relegated to sidebars or appendixes, where they serve more as references than as the core concepts of the class.

In my grammar classes, I try to separate the "official" rules from the best practices, without wasting any time on the "common knowledge" rules. You can see this technique in action in any of my live, online grammar or writing classes.

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October 21, 2010

PowerPoint 2010: Note Handouts with Multiple Slides Per Page

by AJ George

If you have tried to print handouts in PowerPoint 2010 that include the slide notes, you may have noticed a bit of a shortcoming. You can print handouts with multiple slides per page, or you can print handouts that include the notes. However, there is no way to combine these features and print handouts with notes and get more than one slide per page. While it's not possible to do it within PowerPoint, you can enlist MS Word to quickly get the job done.

Open a PowerPoint presentation that includes slide notes.
Choose the File tab on the ribbon.
Select Save and Send.
Select Create Handouts.
Click the Create Handouts button on the right.

The Send to Microsoft Word dialog box appears.
Select Notes next to slides.
Note: If you may be making edits to your slides, select Paste Link as well. This will automatically update the Word file if you make any changes to your slides in PowerPoint. This option will not update changes made to the outline or to slide notes, so if you select Outline Only, the Paste Link option will not be available.
Click the OK button.

Your slides are automatically imported to Word. By default there are three slides (and their notes) per page. If you would like more slides per page, simply resize the slides and font and then manipulate the ruler guides (particularly those on the vertical ruler) to allow for more slides.

Notes Next to Slides

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Writer and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."

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October 20, 2010

Acrobat 9: Pan & Zoom

by David R. Mankin

Many Acrobat users also work with some of Adobe's other amazing products. For example, I use Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat nearly every day.

One of the nice Photoshop features that I have grown to rely on is the Navigator, a miniature window of the currently active file. I can use the Navigator to move around to different regions of the Photoshop page, and change magnification, all without having to switch over to the Zoom tool or Hand tool.

Not many people realize that a tool similar to the Navigator exists in Acrobat and it allows you to move around the current PDF page, and even change magnification–all without changing tools.

While the feature is known as the Navigator in Photoshop, in Acrobat the tool is called the Pan & Zoom tool. It lives on the Select & Zoom toolbar, but it is not part of that toolbar's default set. You'll need to uncover it by right-clicking the Select & Zoom toolbar and choosing Pan & Zoom Window. At this point, the tool's icon will be visible on the toolbar.

Clicking the tool opens a window that contains a miniature view of your current page. This window is movable and scalable. You'll see a red rectangle that exactly mirrors the region of the page that is in view. Drag that rectangle and you can adjust your view panel to show the new location. Change the size of the rectangle and you will adjust your magnification.

Pan & Zoom window

If the red rectangle isn't easy to see due to your page's color scheme, you can change the highlight color as well. You can even navigate from page to page by using the Pan & Zoom's own navigation buttons.

Another Acrobat hidden gem! If you like that trick, sign up for one of my live, online Acrobat classes.

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