Advanced Word Processing Skills: Fill & Download for Free

It depends on what “valuable” means. Modern writing doesn’t require advanced word processing skills in most cases, so I’ll rule that out. If you’re not giving presentations, not much need for those applications. You can learn about databases, but the developer and user views of those are completely different. If you’re not writing software to manage data, you’ll be using the software someone else wrote, which may be specific to a company. That leaves…spreadsheets.Spreadsheets are powerful, and require some effort to use effectively. If the bar is too low, there’s less value in the skill. With a spreadsheet you can manage data (in small amounts), like a database, you can do calculations (needed for business and science), and create graphs and charts (helpful to visualize the numbers, as you would in a presentation).

In a traditional publishing workflow, the author writes the manuscript in a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Pages, or even Google Docs.The manuscript goes to a substantive editor, who looks for things like continuity errors, poor flow, structural problems, and so on. The substantive editor proposes changes, which go back to the author. There may be many rounds of back and forth.When the editor and author are happy, it goes for copy editing and proofreading. From this point on, the author has little or no input.The publisher prepares a cover brief, which describes the elements on the cover and the cover hierarchy, and sends the cover brief to the cover artist. At small publishers, the author may be able to make comments on the cover brief; at large publishers, not so much.The manuscript also goes to the book designer. The designer is a graphic artist with extremely specialized skills. The book designer probably uses Adobe Indesign to design the book, though some holdouts still use QuarkXPress or even (shudders) FrameMaker.In the past, book design was done on a typesetting machine; in the dim and distant past, in hot or cold type.Book design and copyediting may happen at the same time. Bigger publishers will prepare an “advance reader’s copy,” or “ARC,” from the initial design. This is a book sent out six months before publication to reviewers. It may not be completely proofread and it may not even have the final cover art.Once the design is signed off on and the copyediting and proofreading are done, the book is sent to the printers, usually as PDFs, sometimes in original page layout format.The printers print the pages on a machine called an “imagesetter,” which prints on enormous sheets of black and white photographic film that is used to make printing plates, or on a “platesetter,” which prints directly onto printing plates.ImagesetterSheet of film from an imagesetterPlatesetterPrinting plateThe film and plates are made with many pages from the book arranged in a special order on one plate, so that the paper can be printed, folded, and then cut, and by magic, the pages will end up in the correct order. This process is called “page imposition.”Imposed pagesThe pages are printed on a printing press like this, then folded in half lengthwise, then folded in quarters widthwise, then the folds are cut, et voilà! The pages turn out to be in the correct order!The trimmed pages are arranged, bound in a bookbinding machine, and shipped from the printer to the distributor.

This is not a direct response to your question but I hope it helps nonetheless.Firstly, you don't need to join an institute to learn Technical Writing.To be a good Technical Writer you just need:Good command over the English Language (it is really embarrassing to see a typo or a grammatical error in a document)Advanced skill-level in any word processing tool. Most common word processing tool in use today in MS Word, there are others like Open Office, Google Docs, etc. that are very similar but free of cost. Your skill level can be Basic and it is good enough to get the job done as long as you are creating simple text based documents, more skill may be required if you are going for higher interactivity, tables, image editing, etc.Most importantly, you need a passion for documentation. You need to have that drive to document processes/products because this line of work sometimes gets very trying and tiring.If you join an institute they will most likely train you on using MS Word and teach you a bunch of hoopla about documentation and it's standard types, etc. again, this is mostly useless as every organization will have their own organization structure. You can just look up basic types of documents in each industry and learn from samples.Another thing to keep in mind, you don't need a certification to prove to the world that you are a TW. Skill and experience is all you need.As an exercise, take any product at home and try to create a user manual for it, to know what to put into the manual just ask yourself this: what would I like to read in a user manual? Share it here if you can or look up the product's actual user manual and see where you can improve. Do this enough times and you will be on your way!All the very best! I hope this helped.