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MadCap Flare does much more than allow you to produce help documentation, in either print or online format. Thanks to its flexibility, along with the functions that have been incorporated into it, the documentation created by MadCap Flare can be used in all sorts of innovative ways within your company too Tony Stevenson explains how.
When we dig into this product, we see that it can be used to create the content of e-learning courses or knowledge bases. While MadCap Flare is an XML-based help authoring tool, the strength of this particular product is that you don’t have to have XML programming experience to take advantage of all that it has to offer.
In fact, you or your technical writers or documentation specialists don’t have to know anything at all about XML! Of course, the reverse applies too – anyone who is conversant with XML can use MadCap Flare to reap all the benefits provided by XML. For me personally, the appeal of this software is its “single source” publishing capability.
In other words, you can use the contents of just a single MadCap Flare project to generate output in a number of different online and printed formats. Power like that means that documentation can not only be produced much more quickly, the number of errors can be significantly reduced as well.
After you’ve installed a new piece of software, often there is a steep learning curve in attempting to maximise your use of that software. To overcome that difficulty when using MadCap Flare, a collection of “Quick Start” video tutorials are supplied with the software. These video tutes provide a convenient and quick way of learning how to use the software, with examples of two of the titles from that collection being “Touring the Flare Workspace” and “Flare Compared with RoboHelp”. Another common problem that arises from installing and using new software is knowing how to deal with legacy systems.
Fortunately, MadCap Flare caters for that problem by allowing a wide variety of “old” documentation formats to be imported.
