Note taking can be a tricky job at the best of times, but when it comes to learning highly technical information from a subject matter expert (SME), the task always seems that much more difficult. A big part of our job at Essential Instructions is consuming highly technical information, digesting it, and disseminating it in [...]
Writing HTML can be quite tedious due to the verbosity of the language’s syntax and in trying to remember all of those attributes and their values. If this sounds like your assessment of HTML, then we may have found a solution for you. Enter: Markdown. Markdown is a plain-text format language with easy-to-remember syntax, which [...]
Microsoft Word offers a plethora of features, some of which are obvious and others not so much. In this article we’ll share some quick tips to help make editing of existing content easier in MS Word. Increase visibility in tracked changes: often times when correcting spelling you only change a single character in a word. [...]
When it comes to single sourcing tools (tools for outputting manuals to multiple formats from the same source content), there are a number of popular tools available such as Adobe RoboHelp, Madcap Flare, etc. However we at Essential Instructions are partial to a tool called Help and Manual (H&M) because of its ease of use [...]
As a Windows user I’ve always admired the polish, look, and functionality of the Mac OS, in particular its application docking bar. That clean, smoothly-animated, and unobtrusive bar always seemed like the perfect solution for making applications readily available. So this got me wondering if there was a similar utility available for Windows and after [...]
Here at Essential Instructions we love replacing instructional text with visuals, and one of our favourite ways to do this is through the creation of video tutorials. Video tutorials reign supreme when a product has long, intricate, or difficult user interface procedures, because videos allow the user to follow along, pause, and rewind at their [...]
If you were into computers in the 1980’s there’s a good chance that you either owned or had access to one of the best selling computers of all time, the Commodore 64. The “C64” as it was commonly known as, introduced countless youngsters to the digital world and served as the platform upon which the [...]
In our part article: A Holistic Approach to PowerPoint presentations, we highlighted the importance of simple, easy-to-follow presentations. In general we’ve always encouraged simple slides limited to three bullet points or less, replacing text with visuals where possible, and providing a copy of important information as separate handouts so that the audience can focus on [...]
On the grand timeline of computing, the concept of user-centric software design is relatively new. And whilst designing a product with the end user in mind may not (or should not) seem revolutionary, the term “usability” has certainly become a buzz word in recent years. One source of poor software user interface design that we’ve [...]
Here at Essential Instructions we love finding shortcuts and cool things in Windows, especially in version 7. After some recent poking around we’ve uncovered two cool keyboard shortcuts and two powerful applications which may enhance your Windows 7 experience. 1) Quickly launch a taskbar item with the keyboard: the Windows taskbar allows you to add [...]
