Eliminating technical writing re-work with three basic productivity boosters

If you are a technical writer, you know that the least enjoyable part of our work is re-work—making the same change over and over across tens, hundreds, or even thousands of documents.

Unless you have access to unlimited budget to hire other technical writers or buy an expensive authoring platform, re-work might seem like an ugly but necessary part of your job. It doesn’t have to be. With a few simple—and free—productivity boosters, you can reduce or even eliminate technical writing re-work.

CTRL+Y

Imagine you’ve given a document where the previous writer applied a different style to every heading and, for some headings, didn’t apply a style at all but used local formatting instead. Manually applying a consistent style to all the headings could take as much as three or four steps (select the heading, open the style menu, scroll through the list of available styles, and select the correct style) multiplied by the number of headings in the document.

Thankfully, most authoring tools support the CTRL+Y keystroke sequence. Instead of completing these same four steps for each heading, you can complete them once for the first heading and, for each of the other headings, select the heading and press CTRL+Y.

This is a simple trick, and most writers know about it, but it’s easy to forget about. If you can keep CTRL+Y in mind, though, it can save you many hours of repetitive clicking.

Clipboard history

As a technical writer, you know how valuable your operating system’s clipboard can be. It saves you from having to re-type the same words or re-insert the same images or other media.

But what if you need to copy two or more items from one document to other documents (or different locations in the same document)? You might copy the first item from the source document, paste that item into the first destination document, go back to the source document, copy the second item, paste that item into the first destination document, and repeat for every item and every destination document. Thankfully, Windows clipboard history can save you all this back-and-forth.

To enable clipboard history, open Windows Settings, browse to System > Clipboard, and turn on the Clipboard history option. You can then copy more than one item to the clipboard at a time. To choose which item to paste, press WIN+V rather than CTRL+V. A popup appears showing all the items in the clipboard.

If you have an item you copy and paste on a regular basis, such as boilerplate text that you include in every procedure, you can pin the item to the clipboard so that it always appears in the popup when you press WIN+V.

Although clipboard history can’t replace a full fledged single sourcing tool or content management system, it can save you a lot of tedious back-and-forth when copying content.

Multi-file find-and-replace and regular expression

Although clipboard history can save you time when you need to make changes across, say, a dozen or so documents, what do you do if you need to make a change across hundreds or thousands of documents? This is where multi-file find-and-replace comes in handy.

There are many free find-and-replace tools available. One I particularly like is Find and Replace (FNR) from ZZZ Projects (the same people behind Html Agility Pack). FNR allows you to find and replace text across any file in a specified folder that meets your defined criteria. You can save your find-and-replace criteria as a command line that you can then include in scripts.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can use regular expression (regex) with FNR and most other multi-file find-and-replace tools. Regex takes time to learn, but once you’ve mastered it, you’ll find it is a much more productive way to make changes across multiple documents than finding and replacing literal text strings. For example, you can find and replace all these items in a single step using regex:

• click the button
• Click the Button
• clicked the button
• clicking the button
• click on the button
• click a button

Regex is a popular topic in technical writing circles. There are conference sessions, webinars, and other resources on regex available through STC, Write the Docs, and MadCap Software.

Going beyond the basics with task automation

If your productivity needs go beyond what’s possible with CTRL+Y, clipboard history, multi-file find-and-replace, and regular expression, you may want to investigate task automation.

Task automation can include everything from macro creation to scripting to full fledged app development. What specific task automation tool you adopt depends on your (or your co-workers’) technical skill level, your budget, and your schedule. A comprehensive overview of task automation would require far more than a single LinkedIn article, but if you are able to commit the necessary resources, you should find that task automation will more than pay for itself by eliminating all of your unwanted technical writing re-work.