Tech writers on the STC Lone Writer SIG listserv were talking recently about input devices they use to alleviate, or to attempt to outright avoid, repetitive stress injuries in their wrists and hands.

I’ve been using the AirO₂bic mouse at work and at home for several years and love it. Its general design is on the order of a mouse turned on its side. It still has scroll wheel and two buttons, with the top button acting like the left button on traditional mice devices and the bottom button acting like the right. It features a hand rest that comfortably cradles your hand while you work.

The product design is based on the premise that the “handshake position” is more natural to human physiology than the “pronated position” (palm down) that is needed with traditional mice devices. In a pronated position, muscles are tensed when the wrist is turned to allow the hand to use a traditional mouse, and those muscles remain tensed for the entire time that the wrist is held in that position. This persistent tension constricts blood vessels, affecting blood flow into muscles. Over time, an injury occurs due to an “accumulation of damage to tissue cells that do not get a chance to heal and repair because we go back and repeat the same process day in and day out.”

I had no difficulty adjusting to the mouse, and within the first few minutes was working just as quickly with it as I had with a traditional mouse — if not moreso. However, nearly every co-worker who has sat at my computer has had great difficulty adjusting to it. The exceptions have been gamers and pilots…presumably because of their existing comfort levels with joysticks.

The AirO₂bic mouse sells online for $99.95. You also can get their Virtually Hands-Free Mousing System, which includes the mouse and either the Nib (PC) or McNib (Mac) software, for $149.95. They have a network of resellers around the globe to support international orders.

I can honestly say the device is worth every penny.

Sometimes, being a technical writer is enough to make you run screaming for the comparable simplicity of a sales clerk job at Barnes & Noble. Or to a cabin deep in the woods of Western Massachusetts.

Mars Girl, a tech writer in Ohio, recently wrote about her frustrations with her current contract — a gig that has not, to date, yielded the professional fruits of growth and fulfillment she’d hoped for.

I laughed a lot while reading her saga — laughed out of amusement, empathy, and commiseration. In her paragraphs, most any working tech writer will find something they relate to. The stories we all could tell would keep Scott Adams in Dilbert storylines for decades. 

Too many folks, not just tech writers, work for companies that seem caught in an endless loop of misdirection and no direction. They have processes and flowcharts that, while detailed, don’t always reflect what’s actually having to be done on a day-to-day basis…many times at management’s own instruction. This Shtikl comic, I think, perfectly illustrates these environments. The sad thing is that the folks who can least afford to be lost are the same ones who are lost…and clueless about the fact that they are. 

Similarly, there’s the environments where there actually is a direction…it just seems to take unnecessarily long to get from Point A to Point B. I call it management by cowpath. If you ever read the old “Family Circus” cartoons, you can probably remember the circuituous paths home that Billy would take from school or Jeffy would take from a friend’s house. A Brevity comic strip used a tumbleweed and a flock of sheep for its metaphor; coming to the top of a hill, the sheep leading a flock of hundreds says, while looking at what was in front of them for presumably miles, “Oh brother, we’ve been following a tumbleweed this whole time.” You know you’re headed somewhere. Eventually.

On April 5, I gave a presentation at the STC Connecticut chapter’s Professional Day on a help authoring topic. During my presentation, I mentioned that I used an outlining tool other than the one available in Microsoft Word…one that I’ve used for years.

Almost instantly, every head in the room went down and I could hear pens all around me as they scribbled across paper to record the software name and URL.

I’m apparently not the only person who dislikes Word’s outliner. If only Microsoft would notice.

The tool is called Action Outline, and it’s developed by Green Parrots Software. There’s a 15-day trial with limited functionality, and the downloadable full version can be purchased for $39.95. If you rely on outlines for planning long documents, online help systems, or most anything else, AO is worth every penny.

Just a few reasons why:

• You can concentrate on the structure and text of your outline, instead of getting hung up on formatting. While you’re working on the outline in AO, everything is simply items and sub-items; you don’t get caught up in trying to make Roman numerals, letters, or decimal points fall in line as you work.
• You can concentrate on overall structure before diving too deep into the supporting text. The left pane of the window lets you focus on your outline tree, and the right pane lets you add supporting information, notes, or quotes when you’re ready.
• It formats your outline in printed output or file format (e.g., RTF) the way you ask it to — and then honors that format until you tell it to do something else.
• You can move individual outline items, or entire branches of the outline tree, with drag-and-drop operations.

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t want Microsoft to notice. They might decide to buy Action Outline and then ruin a really good thing with their own “improvements.”

If you’ve been looking for something different for your Desktop wallpaper, Creative Memories (a purveyor of scrapbook supplies) offers 35 new choices.

Inspired by their own paper stock, some of the wallpaper designs are clearly geared toward scrapbooking enthusiasts. Others, like their Bohemian design (near the top of the list…hold your mouse pointer over each thumbnail to display a “tooltip”) are unique designs that would appeal to non-scrapbookers. Most wallpapers provide sufficient contrast for your Desktop shortcut icons to stand out.

Each design has been posted with three different resolution settings, and can be downloaded with the right-click Save Target As… menu command.

Erik Rhey wrote a post today called “Wasteful Tech Habits That Chap My Hide” — a list that’s worthy of being posted on office refrigerator doors everywhere.

His “print everything under the sun” list item struck a chord with me. I work with people who are compulsive about printing pages and pages and pages of “stuff” off the Web, and who print endless rounds of iterative drafts of manuals on the high-end color printer in the office. It bugs me as much as it bugs the office manager.

As a writer and editor, I have to print my share of review copies of documents for myself and others at some point during their development/production cycles. In spite of this, I’ve always tried to save trees (and help manage office supply costs) by taking advantage of available printer property settings:

• Duplex printing (printing on both sides of a page of paper)
• 2-up printing (printing two pages on one side of a piece of paper)
• Combined duplex and 2-up printing (printing four pages on one piece of paper)

On the toner-usage side of things, I print most color documents with black-and-white settings, and many b&w documents with toner-saving settings (where document text comes out more dark grey than black).

I have no idea if my efforts even begin to balance out what colleagues are doing, but at least I don’t feel like I’m contributing to the problem.

…so how do you enforce consistency when users won’t cooperate? When they don’t read your cheat-sheet instructions? Retain anything from your training sessions?

You turn into Style Gallery Cop and put your documents into lockdown. “Lockdown” means blocking users from modifying styles and from applying direct formatting to the document.

To do this:

1. Open the Word document or template in question.

2. Make sure your Style Gallery contains all the defined styles your document’s users will need and doesn’t contain any “adhoc styles.”

3. Go to the Tools > Protect Document menu item. This will open the Protect Document sidebar on the right side of your document window.

4. Select the checkbox next to Limit formatting to a selection of styles. This will open a dialog box in which you can define the specific formatting restrictions.

5. Do one of the following:

• click on the checkboxes next to the styles that you want to allow folks to use in the document
• click All (which provides access to all defined styles while still preventing modifications and adhoc formatting)
• click Recommended Minimum (which works best if your document has simpler style needs)

6. Click OK to save your changes and return to the Protect Document sidebar.

7. Click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection. This opens a password dialog box.

8. Enter and confirm a password.

9. Click OK to start document protection.

Whenever your document is opened, the Protect Document sidebar will appear in the document window, notifying that the document is password-protected and that special restrictions are in effect. The user will be told that s/he can format text only with certain styles (an Available Styles hyperlink will help them see which ones). The formatting restrictions will remain in effect until the Stop Protection button is clicked in the Protect Document sidebar and the password is entered.

This tactic requires some time upfront to make sure all needed styles are defined, but it will save many hours of repetitive reformatting during the editing phase and production checks.