Chris Morton is a marcom/technical editor, author, proofreader, layout artist, and publisher who has been engaged in the general B2B/B2C, IT, infosec, and medical device realms for over 25 years.
case study – USA Group/TRG
TRG management had approved a desired look for its courseware, but were wholly unsuccessful in using Word’s table function to create a custom layout template. It was a mess any time a staff member inserted a graphic, such as an icon or screen capture, into their tabular layout.
Through evaluative testing, I determined that the best solution was to switch to a columnar format. But to the uninitiated, using columns in Word can also be challenging. TRG needed a user-friendly system it could deploy to its staff as well as to client universities.
The accompanying Help system I developed for the TRG publishing system.
Given these all of the parameters, I developed an automated publishing solution based on a custom Word template.
The key to this easy-to-use solution was a Workbook Toolbar, where each button ran a WordBasic (the precursor to VBA) macro I had programmed.
The result offered a very high degree of sophistication, yet performed flawlessly when used by staff who had received less than ten minutes’ worth of instruction in its use.
As an independent exercise, I used RoboHELP ’95 to create a related Help system (shown above).