Pat Barry
PAB Consulting
pat@patbarry.net
847.612.1051

Portfolio: Technical Writing & Editing

~ Software Documentation ~

I produced the following documentation of the Task Coach v0.73.2 application for my final graduate school project. Task Coach is a simple but robust, open-source application that’s easy to use for managing tasks, projects, and people. It was developed by Frank Niessink and Jerome Laheurte and is free to use for both individuals and companies.

Task Coach Documentation Plan
Documentation Plan (pdf)
This plan outlines the purpose of each deliverable, an analysis of the audience for each, the document requirements, information sources, and the project schedule, dependencies and milestones.

    Portfolio Categories

    Skills Used
  • Audience analysis
  • Document planning
  • Grammar
  • Style guides
  • Style sheet development
  • Advanced MS Word
  • Indexing
  • Analysis
  • User documentation
  • Application testing
  • Spatial perception
  • RoboHelp
  • HTML
Installation Guide (pdf)
This document is a concise description of how to download and install Task Coach for seven different operating systems. The content came from the Task Coach site but was reorganized and condensed for this two-page guide.
TC User Manual
User Manual (pdf)
This manual is a comprehensive guide to using all of Task Coach's many features. I created all of the content as there was no existing documentation for the application at the time. I submitted a copy of this to the developers.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions (pdf)
The source for many of these questions was the Task Coach web site, and I added questions that arose as I was learning to use the application. I organized all the questions into subject groups and added navigation to the page to improve its usability.
Quick Reference Card
Quick Reference Card (pdf)
The Quick Reference Card is for users already familiar with Task Coach but who need a quick and easy reminder of how to use various features. It is comprehensive and recieved high praise from the developers.
Task Coach Help application page
RoboHelp Application
I developed this application by importing the User Manual from Word and breaking it up into topics. I edited the HTML to clean up the imported Word styles and created a master page.