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Gary Robinson wondered: <<I have several hundred fields in a new
software application that need to be documented. Both the project
manager and the software architect have said these files have to be
in Excel so they can be batch loaded into the software for
compilation. Typically, my field-level help will be a title and a 2
to 4 sentence paragraph with the title and occasional key term
bolded...>>
If I've got the meaning right, it sounds like the application itself
is an Excel spreadsheet... right? Given that this is the case, it's
worth trying to encourage the developers to embed the help directly
in the worksheets containing the calculations. This can work much
better than forcing users to leave their task to consult a separate
help file. One nice thing about Excel is that you can place all the
help text in another page of the spreadsheet, and import it by
reference into the pages that contain the actual calculations.
<<So far, I can find no way to create or import formatted text or
line breaks in Excel. Has anyone found a way to produce formatted
text and line breaks within a single spreadsheet cell?>>
How to do this will undoubtedly depend on the version of Excel you're
using. Older versions did not support named styles like the paragraph
styles in Word, but you can certainly select a batch of cells
simultaneously and apply formatting to them: font, font size, color,
emphasis, etc. In terms of line breaks, you can press Alt-Enter on
the PC and Option-Enter on the Mac to force a line break. You can
also set cells to expand to the size of the contents... not sure how,
but you should be able to find this by searching the Help for "cell
size".
Also check your version's online help to see whether it supports the
import of RTF (rich text format) files; if so, these should preserve
some or all of the text formatting.
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Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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