In the commitment stage, you feel comfortable with your decision. Because let’s face it, everyone knows Word now. And that’s a lot sexier than being a Word guru. I went from knowing so little that I couldn’t even participate in a training class to designing custom training for our clients. I went from calling MadCap support begging for help to being the first stop for other tech writers when they needed assistance. I played with conditions and snippets and variables. Once I mastered lists, it was on to tables, and from there, to mastering HTML output. Which meant I needed to learn CSS and how it worked with Flare to create both the look and functionality of the documents I wanted to create. I started with one concept, the one that had been my pain point way back when I was going steady with Word: bullets (or lists, for the documentation professional). I would have to reprogram myself if I wanted to stay in this relationship (starting with learning what “float an image” means). But with Flare, I had to come to the realization that I was the problem. I was used to just opening a program and mastering it (okay, maybe not mastering, but having a working knowledge of it) within a few hours. And I would blame Flare – “This stupid program just complicates everything!” – and go running back to Word. I’d try to make spacing consistent between sections, and they would look even worse. I would float an image to the right, and everything after it moved right too. I would edit a list, and bullets would end up way down at the end of the topic.
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It needs you to understand that it will not speak to you for a full 24 hours if you ever utter the name “Dreamweaver” in front of it. It needs you to understand what topic-based authoring is and why you want to be structuring your documents that way. It needs you to understand the not-so-subtle differences between it and those old word processor programs you used to run with. Like, it needs you to know CSS before you jump in and try to tell it what to do. What is the reality? If you want to get involved with a glamorous, sexy, deep program, you need to understand it first.
No yelling, no fighting, both of us on the same page.
It is a glamorous program, sexy and deep. By contrast, MadCap Flare is a content management system that makes things like lists and sections, and styles just seem easy. I was hanging on to what everyone else could see was a dead-end relationship. We’d silently been on the outs for a while, with the occasional outburst on my part when bullets inexplicably went awry. I’d used Word for decades and was known as the Word guru in every organization I worked with. When I first heard about MadCap Flare, it was sold to me as an alternative to Microsoft Word.