Now that we’re migrating to Flare, I’m getting to do fun things again.
Today, I used Google Apps Script to automate moving reusable content in bulk from a Google Sheet into Flare. This reminds me how much I enjoy working on the tooling side of technical writing.
We also recently got a test folder in Flare. In just a few hours, we were able to do a bunch of search-and-replace on styles and use regular expressions to clean up formatting issues. Similar work took months of manual tagging in our old system.
It’s nice to be back in a tool that is actually designed for technical writers.
I think this is my seventh documentation migration, give or take. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if there might be a future for me in migrations. I love figuring out how to get content out of a system that isn’t working, clean it up, automate as much of the process as possible, and give writers a better place to work.
I’m looking forward to the day when we’re completely out of our old toolset and no longer maintaining content in multiple places. Instead of spending so much time negotiating with troublesome tools, we’ll be able to put our energy into improving content.
And, apparently, writing Apps Scripts for fun.
Leave a Reply