AT.SE Author Tools Student Edition

Writing walkthrough guides is easy.  It’s the formatting of the content that will take you forever to do, especially of you are wanting to repurpose the content into other formats like scripts, blog posts, summaries and even books.  And if you want to make a change to a guide, or correct mistakes then that can take just as much time because you might break some of the formatting, or pagination, or you may miss one of the formats.  And if you wanted to have specific page breaks, formatting requirements or different page sizes for different versions then it just doubles or triples the work.

Some people may have lackeys or interns that they can give this job to, but your probably are not one of them, and don't want to have to spent weekends formatting books and transferring images one by one into Word so that you can publish document or create detailed blog post series.  That's what the Author Tools for PowerPoint are for.

These tools automate a lot of the leg work that you would have to do manually by using PowerPoint as a repository for all of the walkthrough details and then uses pre-defined word templates as a basis which it then transfers all of the images and text automatically and also formats all of the walkthroughs in a number of different ways based on how you are wanting the information to be consumed.  This reduces the time to format a 400+ page book from 8+ hours and tens of thousands of repetitive keystrokes to probably about half an hour and a single click.

Note: The Student Edition is exactly the same as the standard edition except it is limited to publishing 25 slide.  It is designed to let you get your feet wet with the tool and to enable you to use it for blogging..