Have you ever shared a Word document with someone only to find the images it included didn’t get sent over?

This is probably because the images you had were linked rather than embedded. You now have two options:

1. ZIP the entire folder with the Word document and all the images (and hope that the links are relative and not absolute). I use 7Zip for such things (it’s free).
2. Change all the linked images to be embedded within the Word document.

The latter option will result in a larger file size, but means you are only sending one file. But how do you do it? Microsoft haven’t made it very easy but the key is locating the Links dialog. This shows all the linked images and allows you to break the link and embedded them. The tricky bit is finding this elusive dialog.

Here’s how it works on my version of Microsoft Word, Office Professional 2010.

If you don’t see the Edit Links option, here is how to add it, once it’s added, it should appear as per the video above.

I’ve written about this twice already, but as they continue to be amongst the most viewed I thought it was worth updating the information.

• How to embed linked images in Word 2010
• How to embed linked images in Word 2007

This should be easy. I work in a software company, I’ve only ever worked in software companies so, in honour of Ada Lovelace Day (what do you mean, who?) I should be able to join in “sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today”, right?

I work directly with many smart and inspiring women and, indirectly, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know many more in my profession, but how many of them have inspired me?

When I sat down to write this I did wonder if I would be able to think of any women to which I could assign this claim. But then it’s not every day that you take a step back and think about who inspires you, is it?

So, who has inspired me through my career?

My first boss can lay claim to that, but alas, he is a man so I can’t count him here.

My next boss, Kingsley, was certainly influential, she took a chance on me and gently guided my (short) career in her team. She inspired me to be inclusive, and to trust in myself and my opinions, and that it was ok speak up. Looking back it was her coaching that laid the groundwork for that part of my ‘work persona’ as it stands today.

But it’s in my profession that I look for day to day inspiration, and it’s here that I’m lucky enough to have met some amazing women.

In no particular order:

• Anne Gentle - I’ve mentioned her before in this context but Anne continues to crop up in conversations. She remains a leading light as the technical communications industry pushes further and further into the social media landscape. If you’ve ever seen me speak at a conference, you can thank (blame?) Anne for helping inspire me to speak at my first back in 2007.
• Karen Mardahl - as a consistent, intelligent and thought provoking speaker, her passion and enthusiasm for usability and desire to ‘do better’ is a constant inspiration to me.
• Leah Guren - having spent time in a workshop with her, and witnessed her passionate opening keynote at a recent conference, I can attest to her inspirational characteristics.
• Dr. JoAnn Hackos - last but certainly not least, I think everyone in the technical communications field has been inspired by JoAnn at some point or another, and many of us still look to her as a leading light in our field. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if it were not for her generosity in sharing her knowledge and expertise.

The problem with this type of list is the fear that you have missed someone out, and whilst these four amazing women have inspired me professionally, many more inspire me in my daily life, and I’m lucky to count them as friends.

As a man, working within a profession that has a healthy split of gender, I find it heartening that in a heavily male-dominated industry that such women are pushing forward and making themselves heard. One day parity will be achieved and I, for one, look forward to that day.

At TCUK12 this year, I chatted with several people about authoring tools. Vendors, other technical writers, managers, I asked the same two questions, again and again.

What authoring application do you use, and why do you use it?

The answers were illuminating, interesting and always useful. There are many, many options out there, catering to many different needs, and all of them have a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Alas, no matter how hard I tried, regardless of how many ways I tried to bend our requirements, all of those conversations led me to the same conclusion.

No-one out there builds what we want so we may have to build it ourselves.

As part of improvements to our content, one of my team has led the charge to restructure our information. She has a passion for information architecture and devised a three pronged approach to our content. You can either navigate in by role, by product area or… by something else we haven’t yet decided upon.

We’ve audited the topics we have and applied some simple structuring decisions and it is looking good so far. The problem we will soon have is that we will need to build this new structure and make it usable by our customers.

What we would like is to be able to tag our topics, and use those tags to present a default structure to our information. The tags would also allow users to filter the topics they see and, either by addition or subtraction, create a unique set of information for their needs. Ultimately this would lead to personalisation of content in a basic form, but that could easily be enhanced to provide a smarter take on content for each user.

Alas it seems that, without doing a lot of customising of an XML (most likely DITA) based system we won’t get near that and even the products that get close require a compromise somewhere. Most of the time it would be, for the team of writers, a step back to a less friendly interface, and more exposure to the underlying technology of the tool they are using. At present Author-it provides a simple authoring environment that allows the writers to concentrate on writing content.

But perhaps that is the point. Maybe it’s time to try a different set of tools, adopt new working practices, take on a the bigger challenge.

One of the most popular posts on my blog was written a few years ago but still gets a lot of visits and comments; How to embed linked images in Word 2007.

Some of the comments have offered better solutions and one in particular I found myself searching for today. Having upgrade to Office 2010 I’ve realised that Microsoft has, again, “improved” the user interface by moving things around!

So, courtesy of Sarah, here are the updated instructions for how to embed linked images in Microsoft Word 2010:

1. With your Word document open, click the File tab, top-left of the window.
2. On the left-hand side, select Info.
3. On the right-hand side, near the bottom, click Edit Links to Files.
4. In the dialog that is displayed, select and highlight the images you want to convert from the list.
5. Check the Save picture in document checkbox.
6. Click the Break Link button.
7. Click OK to confirm.

The links are removed and the images are now embedded in your Word document.

A quick check of the filesize of the Word document should show a marked increase and you can now distribute the Word document, and the Word document only, safe in the knowledge that the images are embedded.

I’m in the midst of interviewing to fill a vacancy for a technical writer in our team. I’m also thinking ahead as to how to get them integrated into how we do things. And then I remembered what we have done previously.

“Hello, welcome to our wonderful company. Here is a copy of the software, and the installation guide. Go!”

OK, it’s not quite like that but it is a good opportunity to check over a part of the documentation that is crucial but can be neglected.

Product installations come in all shapes and sizes, from those simple wizard driven screens to systems which require all manner of pre-configured and pre-installed supporting applications. The latter can be the trickiest as often there is a myriad of possible, valid, scenarios, and can lead to a lot of presumption.

Regardless, the installation is the first time the real users get to get their hands on your product and so it’s a good place to get reviewed by the closest person you’ll have to a new customer. A new member of your team.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that we were looking for a new way track our tasks. After checking out a few different applications and web applications, I think we have a solution.

The problem we have is that, whilst the bulk of the work is scheduled against a project plan, there are a myriad of smaller tasks and documentation changes that we need to track. These come in through various channels, our Support team, our ‘Core’ team (who maintain the latest stream of the product), and through our team inbox.

Previously we mirrored the development teams approach and used index cards and a BIG whiteboard but it wasn’t really working for us for a variety of reasons. So I spent a couple of days downloading task tracking applications, and hunting for a web-based application that might meet our needs.

There are many out there and the first thing I realised is that most of the are aimed at the project management set and are very date driven. Most of the tasks we wanted to track aren’t heavily date driven, and so are picked up as and when the team has a some spare time in the project plan.

One of the first applications I found was TeamWorkPM which seemed to fit our needs and then some. However it was still quite over-spec’d for what we had in mind so when I stumbled over No Kahuna it was soon apparent that I’d found a good match.

Importantly, No Kahuna is a task tracking application. Dates do not feature. You simply create a project, add project members, then start creating tasks. You can assign a task to a specific project member (or take it for yourself) and when it’s done, it’s marked as completed.

You can add comments to tasks, which is useful when some tasks may sit in the list for a while so you can build out a level of information for when they are finally actioned.

All very simple, it worked well enough in our short trial that I’m happy to shell out $7 a month to get a private project (not visible to the public). If you are looking for an online, lightweight task tracker, check out No Kahuna.

When I get to the bottom
I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and turn
and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again!!!!

Ever get that feeling that you’ve been here before?

I write this blog post with haste as I’m halfway through the penultimate week of a particularly arduous project. Not only are we releasing a new version of the product, but we are completing the first major stage of our move to Author-it.

Overall the migration has been pretty painless. There are still some Word templates issues to work around and getting to grips with Variants has still to be tackled, but overall we are pretty happy with our choice. The only major gripe we have is partly our (ok, MY) own fault, and it’s here that I’ll offer the most valuable tip I can.

If you are migrating legacy content to Author-it (we were moving from Structured FrameMaker), make sure you thoroughly test and check the import settings. Time constraints had me rush this stage and we ended up paying for it, spending far too long cleaning up rogue topics than we had planned. Every cloud has a silver lining though, and it does mean that the documentation is now far more consistently written and styled than it had been. However, going through some 5000 odd topics by hand wasn’t the greatest use of our time!

Soon we will be looking to how we can leverage the output to provide better access to information, feeding into the developer community website we have already built, and improving how we deliver information alongwith our product set.

For the former we have taken some inspiration from the presentation by Rachel Potts and Brian Harris (Red Gate Software) at last years UA Conference, titled Delivering Help in a Support Portal. For our implementation the Publications team will take the lead, and it’ll be interesting to see where it takes us. Web 2.0, anyone?

We will also be looking to provide better online help by introducing Keystone Topics, as suggested by Matthew Ellison. Author-it should make these topics, which are the first topics the user lands on when they start the online help and which provide sensible links to common information (rather than just providing repurposed user manuals), very easy to build.

Two of the team will be in Cardiff for the conference this year so it’ll be interesting to see what we learn there and how we can really start to leverage Author-it in more and more powerful ways. I’m definitely keen to start innovating what we do and, in a few weeks time, we won’t have any further barriers to stop us.