The Logical Blog

September 23, 2010

Writing & Grammar: Understanding Elliptical Sentences

by Jennie Ruby

When I first heard the term elliptical sentence, I pictured a sentence that went around in an oblong circle. And that is not far from the truth. These sentences do sometimes end just where they began. By doing so, they help us determine correct pronoun case, decide whether to use than or from, and save us from undue wordiness.

The word elliptical actually does not refer to the shape of the sentence, but rather to the concept of ellipsis: leaving something out. In the following examples, the section in square brackets is the part that is left out.

Mentally inserting the omitted words can help you choose the correct pronoun:

The economic downturn affected me more than [it affected] her.

I liked the Cirque de Soleil performance even more than she [did].

Thinking about the omitted words can also help with different from versus different than. Than works with the elliptical words added:

Michael is taller than Michelle [is tall].

But when we try adding the elliptical wording and it does not work, we need to use the word from:

Incorrect: Wild rice is different than brown rice [is different].

Adding the words is different at the end of this sentence does not work–so we need from and not than. The correct sentence is this:

Correct: Wild rice is different from brown rice.

In the next example, using an elliptical sentence can save us a lot of words. When you take out the bracketed section in this next type of elliptical sentence, you put in a comma to indicate that words were left out:

Jones is in charge of Marketing, Utz [is in charge of] Advertising, and Brown [is in charge of] Outreach.

Jones is in charge of Marketing; Utz, Advertising; Brown, Outreach.

Notice that in the elliptical sentence, the list commas had to be upgraded to semicolons once the list items contained commas.

So to test your pronouns, check for different than versus different from, and to eliminate wordiness, remember to use elliptical sentences, and you won't have to run around in circles trying to find the right answer.

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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.

September 22, 2010

Technology: Is Your Cell Phone a Vampire?

by AJ George

After running a couple week's worth of tips for prolonging your Droid's battery life, I was approached with additional battery related topics. I wouldn't say I'm an authority on all things battery-related, but I was able to find a few resources on the topic that I'd like to share.

Is your cell phone sucking energy?

If you leave your cell phone plugged in all night to charge, even if it really only needs a few hours to fully charge, you're wasting energy, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, you are, but you probably aren't wasting enough energy to really make an impact on reducing your energy usage if you change your ways. The term for such unnecessary sucking of energy is called vampire draw.

This article does a good job explaining exactly how much energy is being burned up by leaving your cell phone (and other electronics) plugged in. Some highlights of the article:

If you leave your phone plugged in all night, every night for a year, you will be using 6.5 kWh of energy. Compared to the 4,000 kWh the average American uses each year, it's really kind of a drop in the bucket. If you'd like to do something little to make a bigger difference-swap one incandescent light bulb in your home for a fluorescent bulb and save yourself 126 kWh a year.

It is suggested that you unplug your phone's charger when it is not in use (because every little bit of energy you save helps, right?); but the article also pointed out how tiny of an impact unplugging will make. If you leave your charger plugged in the entire year (8,760 hours) you will only be using a total of 2.3 kWh of electricity–equivalent to the amount of energy you would save that year by skipping one hot bath.

The article goes on to cover iPod and laptop battery energy consumption, as well as if it is better to charge your devices in your car or in your house (spoiler: you're better off at home). It is definitely worth a read if you've ever pondered how your gadgets were affecting your energy consumption.

If you read the article and are still convinced that you should be more proactive about vampire draw, there are a few products that are specifically made to eliminate needless use of electricity, like this Volt-Star Eco-Charger.

The jury's still out on overcharging

Whether or not overcharging your cell phone's battery can cause the battery to lose its charge faster has been the subject of much debate. Most resources I found (like this one) said that today's gadgets are very difficult to overcharge and that any depletion in battery life you experience is due to regular wear and tear of the battery over time. Others swear that leaving their phones on the charger too long has led to a decrease in battery life as compared to when they only charged it long enough to reach full charge. I couldn't find any official sources stating that this was the case.

I charge my phone all night, every night and have not experienced any sort of loss in battery life, but I'd love to hear from you. Do you notice a difference in your phone's battery if you leave it on the charger for too long? Do you think that's all just hype and overcharging is a thing of the past? Leave your comments below.

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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."

September 17, 2010

Writing & Grammar: Politics, Religion… and Hyphenation

by Jennie Ruby

I cannot blame my FrameMaker colleague Barb Binder for lumping hyphens in with religion and politics as topics not to be touched on in the classroom. But it is my job not only to touch on the topic of hyphens, but to explain what can be explained and then moderate the ensuing battles.

Here is one aspect of the hyphenation question that can be explained and that can help resolve many a hyphen-related battle. In the dictionary you find that English has three types of compound words: permanently hyphenated, permanently open, and permanently closed. Here are some random examples:

Permanently hyphenated: walkie-talkie, double-stop, double-team, demand-side, closed-captioned, close-cropped, self-made

Permanently open: high school, early bird, disaster area, elm bark beetle, cloud forest, orange pekoe

Permanently closed: database, toothpaste, paintbrush, orangewood, powerhouse, seagull

Just as "Let's Google it" ends up solving a lot of arguments about facts, the dictionary can solve a lot of arguments about hyphens.

So Barb–and other fearers of hyphen discussions–your first line of defense in a hyphenation battle is m-w.com, to find a definite answer on many hyphenation questions. And Merriam-Webster is a permanently hyphenated compound word.

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September 16, 2010

Adobe FrameMaker: Hyphenation

by Barb Binder

What do religion, politics and hyphenation have in common? They are all emotional subjects for most of my students, and I try to keep discussion on all three of them out of the classroom. If you are thinking that hyphenation couldn't possibly fall into that category, then you probably haven't spent much time teaching word processing or layout applications.

As a teacher, I ask questions to engage my students in the learning process, and the first few times I asked them how they handle hyphenation, I was dumbfounded by their responses. Otherwise well-mannered students were suddenly confrontational with others who did not share their views. Who knew? These days, I simply state how to turn hyphenation on and off for different paragraphs and move right along.

Let's say you want to turn off hyphenation on your Heading1s in FrameMaker; here's how:

Place your cursor in a Heading1 paragraph.
Choose Format > Paragraph > Designer (or press Ctrl M)
Navigate to Advanced Properties (button # 5 in FrameMaker 9).
Click twice on the Hyphenate check box.
Why two clicks? FrameMaker check boxes offer three states: on (checked), off (unchecked) and As Is (solid box). If you click once, you will set the check box to As Is and it will leave hyphenation as [it] is..
Click Update All.

Phew. Glad that's over. If you have additional questions about how to control hyphenation, I'm here to help. If you want to discuss when and where to hyphenate, I'm staying out of that debate!

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If you are new to FrameMaker and want to get up to speed quickly, join IconLogic's instructor-led, online Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker class. Hope to "see" you there.

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About the author: Barb Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

September 16, 2010

Troublshooting Tips: Upgrading to Office 2010 for Windows XP Users

by AJ George

A couple weeks ago I upgraded from Microsoft Office 2007 to Microsoft Office 2010–at least I tried to upgrade. It seemed like a routine upgrade process until I tried to open Outlook 2010 and was greeted with a message saying something along the lines of "Please wait while Windows Configures Microsoft Office Single Image 2010."

I had no idea what the message meant, but it could not be ignored. I was able to get Outlook to open by starting in Safe Mode (which you can do by holding down the Control key on your keyboard as you start Outlook). Running Outlook in Safe Mode allowed me to do my work, but I had to remember to use Safe Mode every time I started Outlook and none of the customization I'd done to my preferences was functional.

After struggling with this problem for hours, I got in touch with Microsoft tech support. He went through my computer and deleted any remnants of legacy versions of Office, and spent hours doing who knows what else, but to no avail.

There is an option when installing Office 2010 to customize the upgrade process to only upgrade certain programs. Hypothetically I could have just upgraded everything except Outlook 2007. But, alas, Outlook was the only program I could not opt out of. Eventually I gave up on Microsoft support, uninstalled Office 2010 and just reinstalled 2007.

Two weeks later I was finally given a solution that I would like to pass along to anyone having this same Microsoft Outlook 2010 upgrade problem. The actual fix takes only minutes. All you need to do is download Microsoft Windows Search 4.0 for Windows XP (KB940157). Reinstall Office 2010. And you're done. Outlook 2010 (as well as the rest of the Office suite) now works perfectly for me.

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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."

September 14, 2010

Adobe Captivate: Using Aggregator

by Kevin Siegel

In an ideal world, your Captivate projects would be kept to a respectable number of slides (fewer than approximately 100). Why? Larger projects will take longer to produce, longer to publish, longer for learners to download and, most importantly, longer to complete.

I suggest creating lessons that a learner can finish within five minutes, which typically translates to around 80-100 interactive slides. Of course, there may be occasions where you want to take several small projects and bring them together into one project–without actually copying slides or objects from one project into another.

If you publish your Captivate projects as SWFs, you can combine multiple SWF files into one lesson using the Aggregator. Once added to an Aggregator project, you can publish the combined files as a SWF, EXE file, PDF or HTML. The published Aggregator file will include a TOC using the names of the separate SWF files.

To ensure the uniformity of Table of Contents (TOC) settings across lessons, you can set any SWF in the TOC as the master. The TOC settings of the master are applied to all the other SWFs in the Aggregator.

To create an Aggregator project, first publish some of your Captivate lessons as SWFs.
Choose File > New Project > Aggregator Project.
From the bottom of the window, click the Add Module button and open the SWFs you published.
The SWFs will appear in the Module Title area of the Aggregator. You can double-click a module's name and rename or edit it as you like..
Publish the aggregated projects by clicking the Publish Aggregator Project tool.

Branching to Other Lessons From an Aggregated Project

It's certainly possible that you'd like the learner to end up in a lesson outside the modules you have added to the aggregated project. You can do it and fellow Captivate developer and trainer Mark Fletcher has provided the steps to success:

Open the source cptx file you want to branch from.
Insert an interactive object (such as a Click Box).
Set the Properties of the Click Box to Open another project from the On Success menu.
Browse to locate the file you wish to branch to (you can also choose from a recently opened project from the Project menu).
Save and Publish the source and target cptx files as SWFs.
Add the files to the Aggregator project.
Publish the Aggregator project.
Clicking the Click Box in the published file you want to branch from will now jump to the swf you want to branch to and highlight that lesson in the Aggregator TOC.

Note: When you publish the source cptx file, Captivate should display a message indicating that files/projects are linked to the open project and that these may also need to be published.

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Looking to learn Captivate? We have a couple of options… we still offer two online classes for Captivate 4, Beginner and Advanced. Click here for details on the Beginner class. Click here for details on the Advanced class. We also have a 3-hour class devoted to Advanced Actions. Click here to learn more about that class. Lastly, we've got classes for the new Captivate 5. We are currently offering a Captivate 5 Essentials class and an Advanced Captivate 5 class.

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September 14, 2010

Adobe RoboHelp: Controlling Hyperlink Colors

by Kevin Siegel

Creating a hyperlink in RoboHelp is surprisingly easy. All you need to do is highlight some text and choose Insert > Hyperlink/Popup. Select a topic from the Select destination (File or URL) area and click OK. Alternatively, you can drag a topic from the Project Manager pod directly into an open topic and create both the hyperlink text and hyperlink at one time. Students who attend my online RoboHelp class find the latter hyperlink technique to be the coolest thing ever.

The resulting color of hyperlinked text is typical: hyperlinks appear as blue, underlined text.

You'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that you can control the color of the hyperlinked text by editing the topic's CSS.

On the Project Manager pod, double-click your CSS to open the Styles dialog box.

From the Character group, notice that there are four Hyperlink options: active, hovered, unvisited and visited.

The unvisited link is the color of a hyperlink before a user has clicked the link. Once a link has been clicked, it is known as a visited link. The active link is the color of a link as the user is clicking the link. And hovered is the color of a link when the user hovers the mouse over the link, but does not click.

If you want to change any of the link colors, simply select it from the list and change the color via the color menu at the right. For instance, I'd like to change the Hyperlink (unvisited) color.

Hyperlink (unvisited)

After selecting Hyperlink (unvisited), I selected Maroon from the list of colors.

Changing the hyperlink color

All that's left to do after that is click the Apply button and then click the OK button. Any topics using the edited CSS will use the new hyperlink color.

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Looking to learn RoboHelp? I have a class coming up this month. Click here to learn more.

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September 9, 2010

Adobe FrameMaker: Fix Inconsistent Color Definitions

by Barb Binder

When I produce a book in FrameMaker I usually begin by importing Word documents that have been sent to me from a variety of authors. These files will frequently contain colors that float into my FrameMaker template with the Word files, but I rarely notice them until I get around to updating my book. When I do click the Update button, I am frequently stopped short by a notice via the Book Error Log about inconsistent color definitions:

Notice about inconsistent color definitions

This message shows up when two or more files in a book have different definitions for the same color. For example, one file might have Gray defined as 40% black and another might define Gray as 30%. That's all it takes. You don't even need to be using the color in any of the files for FrameMaker to stop the update.

Here's how to fix Inconsistent Color Definitions should it happen to you:

Open one file and carefully review the color definitions via View > Color > Definitions.
Remove the colors you don't intend to use and double-check the definitions for those you intend to keep.
Once you determine that you have a clean and accurate color list, save the file… and keep it open.
Back in the book window, select all of the files in your book list and choose File > Import > Format to open the Import Formats dialog box.
Set Import from Document to the file with the clean color definitions (it has to be open to be available). Deselect All, then reselect Color Definitions before clicking on the Import button.
FrameMaker replaces all color definitions in all of the book files with the definitions from the clean file. It also adds color definitions that might have been missing from some of the files in the book list.
Update your book and hopefully the Inconsistent Color Definitions message will be gone.

The reason I say "hopefully" is that if there were color definitions in some of the other files that were not in the list you cleaned up, they will still be there, and could continue to cause problems. The nice thing about the Book Error Log is that it lists the problem files and colors so you will be able to quickly zero in on the right document(s). Just open those files and repeat the steps above.

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If you are new to FrameMaker and want to get up to speed quickly, join IconLogic's instructor-led, online Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker class. Hope to "see" you there.

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September 9, 2010

Technology Tips: Make Your Droid Battery Last Longer, Part II

by AJ George

Sprint EVO Last week I covered a couple ways to ensure that you get as much life as possible out of your Droid's battery. This week I bring you a few more battery saving tips.

Monitor What's Using Your Battery

By choosing Settings > About Phone > Battery > Battery Use you can monitor what exactly is eating up your battery life. If your Display percentage is higher than your Android System percentage, you should definitely consider turning down your screen brightness. You can do this by using the Power Control widget mentioned last week or by selecting Settings > Display > Brightness. Disable Automatic brightness and slide the Brightness level as far down as you can while still being able to comfortably see what's on your screen. Disabling the Android Live Wallpaper (by simply selecting a static wallpaper) will also save some battery. Personally I enjoy watching grass sway in the breeze (and it only uses up 2% of my battery) so I leave it be.

Forget 4G (Sometimes)

The penny pincher in me never wants to disable my 4G since I am being forced to pay extra for it every month. But leaving it running gobbles up the battery. Often there is not even a 4G network available and your phone will drain the battery just searching for one. For this reason, I only use 4G when I want to optimize web surfing or download speeds. To turn off 4G, choose Settings > Wireless & networks and disable 4G. If you are running a 3G phone, abide by this same principle and use 2G instead (unless you really need the performance boost).

Cache Out

Many applications leave cached data on your phone that you don't necessarily need. One such app is the Task Killer mentioned last week. To clear these caches, choose Settings > Applications > Manage applications. Select each application listed and if there is a pushable Clear cache button in the Cache area, go ahead and push it to clear the cache.

More Battery Saving Tips

Going to full versions of websites on your phone will use up more battery. Most sites have a mobile version that can be accessed (typically by adding "m." or "mobile." to the front of the site name) that will use less of your battery to load.
When your phone is hot, it eats up more battery. Keep your phone out of direct sunlight and avoid using the phone if it is warm to the touch. Or, perhaps, you could show your phone you really care and put some clothes on it. Or maybe not.
I have not tried them, but I've heard good things about downloading the apps APNdroid and Locale to conserve battery life. APNdroid will turn off certain networks when you aren't using them. Locale allows you to specify how your phone's setting should be adjusted for different circumstances (like when you're sleeping or at work vs everyday use).

Do you have any other battery saving tips? Share them in the comments below.

Note: Image above courtesy www.sprint.com.

Click here for Part I of Tips to Make Your Droid Battery Last Longer.

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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."

September 8, 2010

Adobe RoboHelp: Two Birds… One Stone. Combine Master Pages with CSS

by Kevin Siegel

I'm a big fan of working as efficiently as possible. With that in mind, I teach students who attend my live, online RoboHelp classes how to create Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) on the first day of class. And then I teach how to create master pages on the second day. Of all the wonderful features you'll find in RoboHelp, CSS and Master Pages are arguably two of the most important things to learn and use if you want to work more efficiently in RoboHelp.

If you create a CSS you'll be able to quickly control the look and feel of all of the topics in your project. You can control such things as font formatting, background colors, background images and link colors.

By creating and applying master pages to topics, you can quickly add static objects to topics such as headers and footers (something you cannot do using CSS).

The process of applying either a CSS or a Master Page to a topic is nearly the same. Select a group of topics via the Topic List pod, show the Topic Properties and then visit either the General tab (where you can apply the Master Page) or the Appearance tab (where you can apply the CSS).

Of course, applying both the Master Page and the CSS to project topics does require visiting those two different tabs (General and Appearance), which just isn't very efficient. Looking to double-down? You can automatically have the Master Page apply your CSS to a topic at the same time that you apply the Master Page, thereby eliminating the need to visit multiple tabs.

Show the Properties of a Master Page.
On the Appearance tab, select your CSS from the list of available Style Sheets (you can also create a CSS on the fly by clicking the New button and copy a CSS in from any other project via the browser button).
Click the OK button.
Any topics that were previously using your Master Page will now be using the CSS you selected. In the future, when you apply the Master Page to any topics, those topics will also get the CSS. Should you edit the Properties of the Master Page and change the assigned CSS, all topics using the Master Page will instantly be updated.

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Looking to learn RoboHelp? I have a class coming up this month. Click here to learn more.

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