by Kevin Siegel 
During a recent RoboHelp class, I was teaching the group about numbered and bulleted lists. It was time to select the list and alter it in some way. The exact alteration we were going for isn't important here. What mattered was that to make the alteration to the list, the entire list needed to be selected.
So what's the best way to select a list? Certainly you can do it the old-fashioned way and drag up or down the list to select it. But what if the list is long? A simple slip of the mouse and you'll find that you've selected either too much or too little of the list.
And what if you're working with a table and you need to select the entire table (consisting of dozens of rows) and you want to move the table to a different location in your topic? Once again, highlighting the table by dragging over the rows will work, but is hardly efficient.
RoboHelp features a wonderful, but hidden, feature that will make the process of selecting areas within your topic a snap: the Tag List.
To display the Tag List (which is not visible by default), choose View > Show Tag List. The Tag List appears above each topic's main headline (between the headline and the Design and HTML buttons).
With the Tag List open, it's a simple matter of clicking the List tag to select all of the items in a numbered or bulleted list. Or click the Table tags to select the entire table or the table components such as a row or cell.
Looking for a quick way to remove inline formatting (the kind of formatting that you get when you manually make topic text bold or italic without using a style)? It's a snap with the Tag List. For instance, I manually formatted a word in a topic as bold, italic and underlined. Later, feeling regret, I decided to remove the formatting. I could have manually selected the text and reapplied the bold, italic and underlined styles to remove the formatting. However, it was quicker to use the Tag List by right-clicking the span tag on the Tag List and selecting Remove Attributes.
Spend some time with the Tag List and I'll guarantee you'll find yourself working just a bit more efficiently in RoboHelp than ever before.
Need to learn RoboHelp… and fast? Join my live, two-day RoboHelp class later this month.
