Thursday, December 07, 2006
Requirements: Making Word work for you...
Posted on Thursday, December 07, 2006 4:43:21 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: General
I've been spending a lot of time writing up requirements and use cases and I thought I'd share a technique I've found which really speed things up.

Use Case Template
When I write use cases, I use a standard template, as seen below.



Since a requirements document can contain 100's of these, you want to avoid re-building the template manually, and even copy / paste is a pain because you need to keep jumping back to the blank template.

I wanted an easy way to drop this template into the document right where I was working...

Word AutoText to the Rescue

For this who don't use this feature, it allows you to have word automatically convert text that you type in into other "text". I've used AutoText in Word for years, mainly to convert acronyms into their long form. For example - when I type SDE, it is converted into ArcSDE. Simple.

What I did not know was that you can assign anything to the AutoText - in my case, I have created an AutoText entry that drops in the entire use case template. Here's how you do it...

1) In Word, select something - text, tables - whatever.




2) Now go to Insert --> AutoText --> New


3) This will open a dialog that will assign your AutoText - essentially this is what you type to get the selected text inserted into the document. I use "USECASE"


4) Now, when you are typing in word, and you type in your AutoText, Word ask you if you want to insert the AutoText.

5) Simply hit ENTER and your template drops in place.


It's seemingly little things like this that can make work go much faster!
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