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Creating professional manuals

We are happy to share our expertise with you. About everything involved in creating a good manual – and managing it smartly.

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  • What are mandatory instructions?

    Do mandatory instructions exist, whether these would be mandatory online instructions, mandatory operating instructions or any other kind of working instructions? Actually, they do not. There is nothing ‘mandatory’ about instructions. The term ‘mandatory instruction’ has its merits though. One could interpret mandatory instructions as instructions that should meet certain criteria.

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  • How to Create a Technical File When Importing from China

    Ensuring compliance with EU regulations, including the creation of a technical file, is complicated enough as it is. Throw a supplier on the other side of the plan, that may not even know what a ‘Declaration of Conformity’’ is, and you have a real problem to deal with. In this article, Fredrik Gronkvist, ​co-founder of Chinaimportal.com​, explains what European importers must know about ensuring compliance with various CE marking directives and creating technical files, when buying products from Chinese manufacturers.

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  • User research

    In the design phase of a user manual, it is important to know whether the interactions with the user are optimal. The best answer to this question can be obtained by conducting a user research.

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  • European directives and… manuals

    Almost all countries in Europe are member of the European Union, or are somehow affiliated to the EU. This has important consequences for setting up any manual. In the EU, the European directives on the safe use of a product also have something to say on the requirements for the accompanying manual. As such, a company can be held accountable if a manual is not in compliance with the relevant European directive.

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  • Madcap Flare 11

    As a technical communication service business we chiefly develop user manuals for our clients. Our primary focus is on generating high quality content. Of course, to be competitive, we need to create the output in a fast and efficient way. That’s why we use (and are an authorized reseller of) MadCap Software.

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  • MadCap software

    Whether you want to publish a manual using A5 or A4, or bring your working instructions online… specific software can do the job for you. We use software that is specifically tailored to the needs of technical writers. With MadCap, you can save your content to a central location. From then on, you can reuse it in whatever way you want.  Manual writing software such as MadCap is ideal for planning multiple manuals in multiple languages.

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  • Context Help

    Context-sensitive help, or just “context help”, is a type of user documentation, which is smart enough to deliver the right content at the right moment. Often, this type of documentation is embedded into the application itself, rather than being a separate artefact.

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  • Multi Channel Output

    Multi-channel output is all about making content available through various channels. Users’ needs have shifted drastically and continue to do so, which is why multi-channel output is becoming more and more important. In this article I will outline the ten most significant advantages of multi-channel output.

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  • Research video instructions

    As with nearly every creation, when making an instruction video one should first ask what the purpose of the video is. Is the goal to motivate people, instruct them or simply to demonstrate something? The goal of the instruction video largely determines the different elements and method of the video.

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  • Instruction videos: a rewarding experience

    An instruction video can be very effective indeed. People consider an instruction video to be an experience rather than an instruction. Such an experience takes away the feeling of ‘being told what to do’. Because an instruction video also is very close (if not, identical) to the actual situation in question, people are certainly inclined to give you their attention.

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