btawii.blogg.se

If you are converting a larger storyboard into a number of smaller documents, as you would do if you were breaking them up into bog posts, then you will probably want to add a standard introduction to each of the blog posts, and maybe even some standard follow up text at the end for more information and even an author biography for credit.Īlthough you can do this manually, the Author Tools for PowerPoint has a nifty feature built into it that allows you to create Boilerplate panels in the storyboard just for these types of content and you can have these automatically inserted at the beginning and end of the document as it created saving you a lot of cutting and pasting.īefore we start though, if your template does not have the Boilerplate Master Layout then you will want to add it. In this walkthrough (which is created with Author Tools for PowerPoint) I will show some of the setup and also how it works.Īutomatically adding boilerplate to documents This reduces the time to format a 400+ page book from 8+ hours and tens of thousands of repetitive keystrokes to probably about half an hour and a single click.

For example, if you are building a book then you may want headings on pages, but if you are publishing it as a blog then you probably don’t. These tools automate a lot of the leg work that I used to do manually by using PowerPoint as a repository for all of the walkthrough details and then uses pre-defined word templates as a basis which it then transfers all of the images and text automatically and also formats all of the walkthroughs in a number of different ways based on how you are wanting the information to be consumed.

I blew the dust off my copy of Visual Studio and created Author Tools for PowerPoint. Because I capture all of my walkthroughs in PowerPoint – just because it makes everything look consistent and tidy – I looked into how I could automate the process and have it do all of the work for me.

One day it became too much and I decided that I had to stop the insanity and find a better way. Some people may have lackeys or interns that they can give this job to, but I wasn’t one of them, and have literally spent weekends formatting books and transferring images one by one into Word so that I can publish document or create detailed blog post series. And if you wanted to have specific page breaks, formatting requirements or different page sizes for different versions then it just doubles or triples the work. And if you want to make a change to a guide, or correct mistakes then that can take just as much time because you might break some of the formatting, or pagination, or you may miss one of the formats. It’s the formatting of the content that will take you forever to do, especially of you are wanting to repurpose the content into other formats like scripts, blog posts, summaries and even books. Automatically Adding Boilerplate to Documents with Author Tools for PowerPoint