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Are there any tools of the trade or technology that I should be familiar with for a Technical Writer?

I am a student in the Northlands Job Corps trying to figure out a potential career avenue #career #technology #job

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Mickael’s Answer

Hi Brandy,

I am not a tech writer myself but worked with some, writing document myself and get them reviewed and finalize by these team members.

One is Microsoft Word: You need to be familiar with templates, formatting, indexing, so that you can have documents from your company looking the same no matter who wrote them. And be familiar with macros to fix all formatting that people are unaware to use.

The other one I saw used is LaTex: same as above: how to define common formatting, indexing, bibliography ...

Those are the two ones I've seen used, the former (Word) more than LaTex.

I hope it helps and I hope you will get more detailed answer from actual tech writters.
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Sara’s Answer

As others have mentioned, learn to be an expert user of Word -- templates, styles, references (such as adding and updating a table of contents and an index). This provides basic desktop publishing (as opposed to word processing) skills that can be used in other applications.

Learn to use a basic graphics programs (paint.net is nice and free). I'm not talking about major photoshopping, but learn how to touch up and modify screenshots. Learn about layers, blurring, transparency -- you will have to touch up images to remove sensitive information or test content. Learn about different graphics file types.

If you have access to Visio, that's an excellent tool to learn to build process diagrams. But you can also use PowerPoint to create such images. Learn about alignment options and send-to-back and bring-to-front layering.

Learn HTML. This can serve as a nice introduction to XML, which will come up later.

Learn a video tool for "screencasting," where you record a short help video (or an animated GIF). Camtasia is a great tool with several online tutorials, but there are free tools you can play with to learn about the features and pitfalls.
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Heather’s Answer

Some other SEO tools for writing to make your technical writing work hard for marketing are:
- Ubersuggest: https://app.neilpatel.com/en/ubersuggest - Helps you find the keywords to build into your content to make it more searchable.
- Text Optimizer: https://textoptimizer.com/?utm_source=daily-carnage&utm_medium=email
- Headline Analyzier: https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer?utm_source=daily-carnage&utm_medium=email
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Katie’s Answer

Microsoft Word is the standard program used in business for procedure writing. Many companies have their own internal knowledge platforms to document procedures and they have their own unique formatting features, etc. I tend to write in Word and then copy and past to knowledge platforms so that I can run my work through the spelling and grammar check. Also, many of those platforms are web-based and I've lost work if the service glitches so having a Word back-up can be a life saver. In addition to those, some companies use Adobe Acrobat to make procedures and forms interactive with user inputs, etc. And, I'm seeing video become more common to share process and procedures so skills in video editing tools like Camtasia may be valuable.
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