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Deborah McNally wonders: <<Normally I write online help and printed
manuals. I've been asked for a 'Quick Start Guide' for one of our
products. Does anyone have a suggestion of where to start?>>
The first place to start is with the person who asked you to do this.
<g> What do _they_ want you to do, and _who_ are you doing it for? Is
the "what the boss" wants relevant to "what the audience needs"? If
not, how can you reconcile the conflicting demands?
A quick start guide may begin and end with the installation; it may
completely exclude the installation, and start with "my first form
letter". It may include both. You won't know which approach is
correct until you answer the above questions. In short: define the
goals and the audience, and that will tell you what belongs in the
document. Anything else is extraneous, at least for the moment. That
being said:
<<I don't want to put *too much* into it, but I want to make sure
that I hit all of the points that should be in a quick start.>>
You can't decide to include until you know what you're trying to
accomplish. There are a few general criteria, however, for once you
know what topics must be included:
- Focus on providing basic context (what the reader might want to do
and why) so the reader knows why they're reading this and what the
possibilities are.
- Provide just the basic description of how to do that ("to print
your document, open the File menu and select Print"). Don't sweat the
details: think about the high-level task, not the many variants of
that task ("printing a single copy of the whole document", not
"printing multiple copies of discontinuous page ranges in reverse
order using the printer's duplexing function").
- Provide a cross-reference to the part of the manual that contains
the details for those who have successfully done the basic printing
thing and are now feeling overconfident. ("For an explanation of all
the tabs, widgets and dohickeys in the Print dialog, see page 75 of
the manual.")
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