Need Help Generating User Manuals - Formerly Produced in Word and Published as PDF files

[Mike Zaharof]

Hello Everyone,

I am very new to the Atlassian product (logged in for the first time yesterday) and recently became aware of Confluence for technical writing while browsing YouTube. Come to find out, another department at my company was already using it for some internal projects. 

I recently took over the responsibility to generate user manuals for custom machinery that my company builds. One of the guys who used to do them just retired abruptly, and I am flying blind. He would generate them as Word docs, and then export them to PDFs (not my preferred method). I want to offer customers an interactive document either hosted on the cloud here, or on our own portal and do away with the PDF files. 

I need to put some standard sections together and augment them with custom information to generate these manuals more efficiently, but I am totally in the dark on how to use Confluence to do that. 

Can anyone suggest any resources or tips that would be of benefit to get me up to speed? I have found a bunch of YouTube videos, but the amount of information seems a bit overwhelming. 

Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated.

Thank you,

Mike 

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Hey @Mike Zaharof

Sorry to hear that you're flying blind right now. Although, there's always something new to learn about Confluence. I can tell you that there are a lot of people doing what you'd like to do with Confluence. Versioning, Publishing, even Conditional content are all possible in Confluence.

At some level, this can all be done in Confluence, but to really get what you're looking for, you'll probably need a few apps. My team makes some that will really help. You can see our online help center made using Confluence here: https://help-cloud.k15t.com/

Also, you can learn more about all this here: https://www.k15t.com/rock-the-docs/documentation-guide

I hope this is helpful to you on your journey. :)

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

And @Mike Zaharof

I'm curious; where on YouTube you are learning about this? We're making video content and we're always curious what's most helpful for people. 😃

[Robert Wen_Cprime_]

Here is the landing page for Confluence documentation, including videos and online documentation. https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/guides