How do I make a living training manual?

[Hipolito]

For work, I want to create a training and reference manual for a couple dozen folks. It will have text and screenshots, maybe flowcharts and tables. It has to be easy to use for people of varied tech-savviness and education levels.

Right now, the training materials I have are a mess of "How do I ..." Word documents in SharePoint. They served well for a while, but a lot of things have changed. Instead of updating or replacing all these individual documents, I want to create one big handy reference manual that someone could print out and put in a three-ring binder if they wanted to.

By "living," I mean I want this manual to be easy to update for whenever our procedures change (which can happen several times a year). I want the page numbers and table of contents to auto-update when I make changes to the manual. It would also be great if a citation like "see topic X on page #" automatically updated if topic X moved to a different page.

I have access to Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote, Adobe Creative Cloud, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams. And I might have other useful apps that I don't know about.

Does anyone have any hints on how to accomplish this, or know of any helpful tutorials or resources?

[LordMortis]

Look at how quality manuals are built. They are meant to be reviewed and updated live and almost always come in a formula to follow. Probably the easiest to emulate that make the most sense would be either an industry specific ISO or CTPAT quality manual. Both are meant to be living.

If it's on a very small scale and informal, I'd think OneNote makes the most sense. It's meant to manual like and it's very easy to organize and update. However, I've never tried to rip a one note into a physical binder.

I'm fortunately years removed from such things but the basic format is to have a thing that needs to be tracked and for each thing there is a section:

1) Objective
2) Process (where the actual training is) and flow
3) Assessment method
3) Measurables for support of assessment
4) Reference

[Blackhawk]

Unless it's changed, Word can do most of what you're describing. It's what I used to work with when writing manuals. The only thing I recall being different is that you had to tell it to update the table of contents (you had to tell it to refresh it, basically.)

But that's been... close to 20 years ago.

[Jaymann]

I dunno, it seems like manual transmissions have been on the decline for quite some time now.

[Skinypupy]

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