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MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER, 2008

Author-it: Creating a list of topics in a book

Because Author-it is a component content management system, you’ll find that you work with a lot of individual topic objects. If you’re working on a book (aka a “project” in other applications), you can quickly create a list of topics in that book using the following procedure:

  1. Click Search.
  2. Under Object Type, select Topic Object.
  3. Under In Book, select the book name from the list.
  4. Click Find Now. The right pane will be populated with all topics used in the book.The list will not include any topics from books that are included in the book itself (when you’re merging books) unless you tick Resolve sub-books.
  5. Select all topics in the right pane.
  6. Right-click and select Copy to Clipboard.
  7. Open Microsoft Excel (or other spreadsheet application). (You can use Word, but it comes in with the tabs…you’ll have to convert the content to a table.)
  8. Press CTRL+V.

Voila :-)

You can use the same technique to create a list of all topics in the library, or with 5.x, for topics in multiple books. (Click the ellipsis button next to In Book and select the books you want to use.) You can also use the same technique to create lists of any object type, such as index entries, graphics, hyperlinks, and so on.

By Char James-Tanny, Author-it Certified Consultant, JTF Associates Inc.  Published with permission; first published on the helpstuff blog.

Posted on 10/11/08 in Author-it Tips & Tricks

5 Comments »

  1. Oh, an AIT blog. Let’s not get our hopes up.

    Will you blog about stuff that really matters, such as when will you allocate sufficient resources to get the bugs in v 5 fixed? It’s a non-delight to pay maintenance for a product whose latest two versions we can’t trust for real world use.

    Maybe a Top Ten Horrid Bugs We’re Trying To Fix This Quarter list?

    Or will this be like Microsoft “fixing” Vista problems by advertising instead of bug-squashing?

    Comment by Happy Happy — November 10, 2008 @ 1:58 am

  2. I’m glad to see this blog up.

    Please change one thing for me; publish the entire article in your RSS feed. It doesn’t look like you’re trying for ad dollars here, so there’s no reason that I should have to click through to your page from my RSS reader. Let me get the information and move on. I appreciate your blog, but it’s not the only one on the web. :-) Feedburner should provide you the stats that you need if that’s your concern.

    Thanks! Keep blogging; can’t wait to see what is happening in the future with my favorite writing tool.

    Comment by Chris McQueen — November 10, 2008 @ 11:01 am

  3. Thanks not so Happy Happy for your anonymous comments. We have a large number of clients using the latest 5.1 for real world use so it is a concern to hear you still have major issues. Yes, we did have issues for sure when first released. That said, every software product in the world has some bugs; we try to allocate resources appropriately to fix the most pressing, and most widely reported, bugs and as far as we are aware most of the major ones have bene resolved. Without knowing who you are we cannot track back to find out exactly what issues you are referring to, and why they have not been resolved yet. Presumably you have already contacted your Account Manager to voice your displeasure but I would suggest that it would be worth connecting with them again to get an update on your issues, and when they are likely to be resolved. As far as “fixing” problems by advertising, in most if not all companies, marketing generally runs a little ahead of development so yes there will often be times where they are out of sync however you make an interesting point, as a marketer I need to pay closer attention to bumps in the road.
    Kathy Howes, Author-it Marketing Manager

    Comment by admin — November 11, 2008 @ 7:19 pm

  4. I’m not so shy. In Author-it 5.2 the Quick Search window (CTRL+Q) provides the same search mechanism as the standard Author-it window but keeps a list of all searches made, lets you rename the search, and has a button called ‘Export results’ that saves the results of the search as a .csv file

    Comment by Matt Armstrong — November 13, 2008 @ 4:23 pm

  5. Great Tip! Nice to see you guys finally have a blog too :0)
    With regards to the above comments – sure, 5.0 did have a few rough edges, but so did Windows 95 and Mac OS8; the really important factor for me was when I did lodge a support call I got results. ALL software has release issues – if companies tested systems until there were no bugs nothing would ever get released, and I think those of us employed professionally in this field accept that. I can, and have, called these guys up at all hours, and even though they are on the other side of the world, I have always got efficient (and more importantly friendly!)solutions to my problems.

    Happy Happy are you a regular user of Author-it? Have you any specific issues you can identify? I can’t see how these guys would let anyone carry on feeling dissatsfied when my experience is of a team of people doing everything they can to provide best practise support. IMHO LOL!!

    Comment by Rhoda Hors — November 18, 2008 @ 8:18 pm

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