Microsoft Word machete

I'm making progress through my tangle of assignments. I've written all (or at least the vast majority) of what I need for my information plan template, and all I have left on it is fiddling with making it a template and then sprucing it up. In addition, I've written a lot for the technical description and quickly edited it once, so it should be finished by sunday at the latest. I've hacked through the tangle of assignments using Word as my machete.

With those two out of the way, I just have to concentrate on a RoboHelp assignment that's due on Tuesday. I have to convert my resume into an HTML help file, and until now I've been floundering with it. When I hear "HTML" I think "webpage", which implies paragraphs and explanation. This is still supposed to be a resume, which means bullet points and short sentences. I have to find some way to reconcile these two conflicting thought processes, and fast. I have all of class on Tuesday to do it, and I actually meant to cobble together some nifty pictures. Guess I'll do that Monday.

Although it's a resume, it's also supposed to demonstrate that we know RoboHelp, and to do that we have to include all kinds of stuff. tables, images, links, popups, text-only popups, DHTML expanding text effects, style sheets, etc. I have all my sections planned out, so I just need to make images and figure out where to put them. Also, I need to decide just where to use expanding and drop-down text. I have som ideas, but nothing concrete yet. I better get cracking.

After that there's a PowerPoint UI assignment due on Wednesday, but I'm already finished. I can see the value of making a prototype UI, but PowerPoint isn't a very easy program to use for it. I can't suggest a better one, and that actually might be my natural hatred of PowerPoint talking.

To round out the week from hell, I have a test on Thursday in my document design class. It covers the first two sections of the course, and is therefore mostly about gestalt principles of design and verbal-visual cognates. Plus some stuff about kerning and typefaces. I don't think it'll be too bad, but I'll still be taking Tuesday and Wednesday nights to study it.

I think there's a website analysis due on Thursday as well, but I'll have to check that. I'm fairly sure we have a speaker coming in, and that means a short one page paper that should only take a half hour but always takes more because a lot of websites make it tough to find the stuff we need. You'd think the writers would realize that other writers need to summarize that info, but I guess not.

On Friday I'm going to sink into a coma and stay there until the end of the world.