I have always liked to keep lists. Whether it is for work using a ticketing system or at home on the back of an envelope, I need a system of some sort that tracks what I need do to.

When it comes to organising the jobs for my one-person consultancy I need something in between. As much as I'd love to have a full-blown work request system (and don't think that I haven't considered it), somewhere in between that and an envelope is required.

Enter Task Coach.

Task Coach is ideal to organise one person's jobs. You can set up tasks giving them start dates, end dates, and priorities. This means you can easily organise your work and see the deadlines approaching and where you should concentrate your efforts. Tasks can also be assigned to multiple categories, so, for example, you can separate out billable and non-billable tasks or have a different category for each client.

Another big feature that I use is effort tracking to record the amount of time I spend on each job. I can start tracking by clicking the Task Coach icon in the system tray and selecting the job. You can also manually enter time against a job (if you forget to start tracking).

It is dead easy to get started with it, but has loads of features that you discover along the way. Others include, setting task prerequisites, recurring tasks, and attachments (although I haven't figured out exactly how this feature is meant to work). There are also a myriad of ways to display the task information (timeline, calendar, and even a task map).

My basic workflow with Task Coach is:

• As I hear about an opportunity I create a task. I tag it with a 'Lead' category so I can easily go back and see what opportunities I need to follow up. I also record any time against the task during this stage (to track how much time I spend on business development and help cost that into the job, if it comes though).
• Before I start the work, I do my estimate and enter the budget.
• As I work on the job I use the in-built timer to track my effort. It is also a good way to keep notes about what I have done – which can then be used on the invoice.
• When I am invoicing I look at the tracked effort and either use the total hours to invoice (if billing by the hour) or review how good my estimation was (if doing a fixed quote).

Overall, it fits well with my small-time operation and personal workflow.

Task Coach is free, can run off a USB drive, and is regularly updated by its developers Frank Niessink and Jérôme Laheurte (and a bunch of translators). It is available on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and even on the iPhone. I wonder when the Android version is coming ;)

I am please to introduce my new business Segue Consulting.

Segue Consulting provides professional technical communication, Author-it consulting, and online communication services.

We specialise in:

• Developing complex technical documentation and training
• Developing online help systems (both integrated and web-based)
• Deploying and customising Author-it
• Deploying content management systems (CMS)
• Developing and deploying websites.

I also have a new email address. To contact me, please use the contact form on the site.

Please visit the site and contact me if I can help you in any way.

By no means a replacement for hard core users of SnagIt, Screenpresso is a good, lightweight screen capture tool.

What I like about it:

• No installation required, so you can run it directly from your USB thumb drive (although, you can install it, if you prefer).
• It has the usual tools that are handy for tech writers (arrows, bubble text boxes, callout numbering, blurring, image shaddows, and torn edge effects).
• It has extra features, like automatic image resizing (to a fixed width, height, percentage, or maximum size) and automatic border effects.
• It is free.

It is not perfect and is not feature rich. For example, I did find it had some strangeness when editing text in text boxes and bubbles. Also, you cannot edit saved images using the free version.

Its place in a tech writer’s toolbox could be on their USB thumb drive as a good alternative when they are away from their own computer.
Find more information about Screenpresso and download it from http://www.screenpresso.com/.

In my current role, I need to produce training material for a software product that has three variations (depending on the licence the user has). The original framework to create these training materials was to have three completely separate sets of PowerPoint slides – one set for each ‘flavour’ of the product.

Coming from a strong single sourcing background, the pain point was that 80% of the content was shared across the three flavours! It was only a scattering of slides throughout that varied between the flavours. The maintenance overhead of having to make updates to three sets of slides for the common content was enormous. Not to mention the scope for errors and inconsistencies between the different variations.

I needed a solution to save time (and my single sourcing sensibility!).

I wanted the ability to include or exclude specific slides based on a set of conditions. (Sounding like Author-it’s variants functionality, anyone??)

The solution

The solution consisted of:

• Marking up slides that were specific to a particular flavour (or flavours) with a condition tag.
• A macro that would ‘publish’ a slide deck for a particular flavour of the product. The macro would remove slides that did not meet the conditions for the required flavour of the product.

Adding conditional tags to the slides

Marking up the slides with the conditions was just a matter of deciding on a convention for the conditional tags. I decided that my conditional tags would begin with ‘<<Cond’.  I put the conditional markers in the notes section of the PowerPoint slides. The following screenshot shows an example of the conditions.

The actual conditions that I could include are totally arbitrary – as long as they start with ‘<<Cond’ (because that is what the macro will look for).

Running the macro

When I run the macro, it:

1. Searches through all of the slides in the deck for conditions starting with ‘<<Cond’.
2. Displays a list of these codes for me to select which conditions I want to apply to the slide deck. If a slides contains:
   • One or more conditions, if any condition on the slide matches one of the selected conditions, the slide is included.
   • No conditions, it is included only if the Include slides with no conditions? check box is selected (see screenshot below).
3. Goes through each slide testing the conditions. If it fails the test, the slide is deleted.

For example, if I wanted to build a slide deck for the ‘Strawberry’ version of the product, I would select the conditions as shown in the following screenshot.

After running the macro, the slide deck would contain only slides that either had '<<CondProduct=Strawberry>>' in the notes section or had no conditional tags at all.

It is rough. It is rudimentary. But it lets me single source, which is what I like.

As a side, I have another macro which goes through the slide deck and removes all of the conditional codes from the notes – just a quick tidy up macro.

If you would like any more information or would like to use my macro, please contact me.