Microsoft Word is a great piece of software. It allows users to quickly and easily write anything from a school report to business letter. The biggest advantage which Microsoft Word has is user-familiarity, it is a software which most of us have grown up with using it both at school and in the office. For many people it is still the natural choice when they need to write anything in a business environment. And for most purposes Microsoft Word is ideal, but there are some applications including writing product documentation for which it is not so well suited.
There are many reasons why Microsoft Word is not the right tool to help you write product documentation, here are just five of them.

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In short, HATs are software developed help authoring programs employed by technical writers to develop help documents, technical manuals and solutions.

As an example, take any product in today’s competitive consumer marketplace world — be it an automobile, a home appliance, computer software or whatever product-type that requires operational instruction, functionality performance or assembly by the consumer — and you’ll usually find an easily forgotten “behind-the-scenes” initiative by dedicated professionals that has led to the successful emergence of that product for sale.

Such is the case — and never to be lightly regarded — is the set of user help documentation that typically accompanies the product; with the ultimate goal of maximizing the usage and functionality experience for the buyer, as well as reducing support costs for the producer. Clear and effective user instructions can often make the ultimate difference in buyer appreciation, loyalty and acceptance as it can often “make or break” a product’s success.

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Creating product help documentation has many similarities with a typical student project. A student project will often need to:

• Discuss a topic in depth, covering each aspect of the topic thoroughly
• Break a subject down into clearly identifiable sections
• Include detailed references supporting the conclusion of the project
• Provide a complete index covering the topic under discussion

All of these tasks can be managed much better in help authoring software than in a conventional word processing package. If you write a student project in Microsoft Word then you have little choice but to start at the beginning of the subject and type the whole thing all the way through. That approach makes project writing tricky and very time consuming.

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