What is technical documentation tools free? There are various tools available in the market that help in writing better and in advanced way. These specialized software used by a lot of writers who are dealing with technical documentation. Those who are experts in their respective fields use these software to document their particular technology so that they can edit it as per their requirement.

The issue of how to create effective and valuable technical documentation is the one that is being asked by many people. Technical documentations are some of the most important aspects of products and services that are used in every day life. Therefore, it’s obvious that it should be created properly and in accordance with some certain rules and standards so that it will be easy to understand for every person who comes across it for the first time.

Technical documentation tools have come a long way over the years in both their usability and functionality. There are literally thousands of choices of the best software to write technical documentation available today. To help you make the right decision, I’ve complied a list of great technical documentation tools that I use every day to write high quality technical documentation for my clients and by extension, you.

Human documentation is always prone to error, technical documentation can be an even bigger problem. Finding the right software to write technical documentation and tools, which will help you with publishing and promoting your documentation is crucial. My research shows that there are many companies and organizations implementing professional documentation solutions in order to seek new revenue, gain business awareness and improve customer satisfaction using interactive communication and increased adoption of their products.

The technical documentation plays a major role in any organization which is involved in different types of software or hardware development projects. Since the inception of this documentation plays an important role for your various business source code or project source code including scripts, codes etc.

Top 10 Software Tools for Technical Writing

The most important part of technical writing is documenting properly. No doubt, technical documentation is complex as well as time-consuming. At the same time, it is boring. But does technical writing means only documentation? In fact, technical writing needs an in-depth understanding of the product and service and target customers. Does that mean technical writing is challenging? Yes, it is!

When you are a technical writer, you need to pen- down every technical detail to make an interesting and informative document. Besides, it should be free of grammatical mistakes and plagiarism free. Hence, to help technical writers, there are many software tools for technical writing that generate top-notch documents.

Furthermore, technical documentation can be of any type among the following ones:

• Policy documents
• Knowledgebase articles
• Online and embedded help
• Simulations
• Training manuals

Why is Technical Writing Important?

Documentation is an important part of any technical project. Whether it is related to software applications, consumer products, or industrial equipment, its specification and functionalities must be simplified to the target audience to make it handy. At the same time, quality technical writing helps avoid misinterpretation of the product functionalities while preventing human errors.

Furthermore, based on good documentation, users can obtain useful, accurate, and relevant information that easily pursues defined goals. Hence, technical writing is a helpful medium to do a project in an organized way. However, what is the available tools that technical writers use to utilize for their purpose? Let’s explore 10 such software tools for technical writing!

1. Whatfix

Whatfix signifies a paradigm shift in the way help documentation is presented online. Static and lengthy web help pages do not catch the user’s attention as effectively as the interactive, pictorial guides presented by Whatfix, popularly called ‘balloons’. 

Moreover, online help in today’s world needs to spread across various gadgets – be it PCs, tablets, or smartphones. Whatfix automatically adapts the help content to suit the gadget. And the same help content can be accessed in different forms – as a slideshow, PDF, or video.

Author’s Tip: Whatfix supports a unique feature – Real-time Interactive walkthrough – wherein you put your help snippets directly into the live product page. The user reads the snippet in the Whatfix balloon and performs the action accordingly on the page. This is a popular technical writing tool amongst business looking for a shift from the traditional methodologies.

Easily create interactive technical documentation with Whatfix

Discover how Whatfix’s Digital Adoption Platform can help your organization create in-app technical documentation with curated content including in-app guidance, personalized workflows, and self-help knowledge bases. Try Whatfix now!

2. MediaWiki

Displaying your product’s online help as wiki pages is a simple and effective idea. Your pages can be integrated into Wikipedia directly if you don’t have a separate website for your online product. Alternately, you can host Wiki-like help pages on your product website. The high familiarity of this format among online users is a key advantage, and the free wiki editing tool MediaWiki Visual Editor makes help creation quite simple.

MediaWiki is a PHP-based web editing tool, which Wikipedia uses. However, even major software corporations, Intel being a key example, use this tool to present their sales and marketing information, How To’s, and help pages on policy and procedures.

Author’s Tip: This technical writing tool comes with good support for extensions – for multi-language content, collaborative reviewing, tracking edits, built-in search, etc.

3. Adobe RoboHelp

Industry-standard authoring tool used to create help systems for desktop or web-based applications. No computer user is a stranger to RoboHelp. Every time your press F1 in any of your standard software applications, the help window that appears is almost always created using RoboHelp. However, it can also be used to churn out the conventional technical documentation for print, such as guides and training manuals.

The sophisticated RoboHelp IDE enables technical writers to develop large-scale help projects and render them on multiple hardware devices/operating systems, and in multiple formats (PDF, HTML, DOC, etc). The Older version of RoboHelp can be purchased as a low-cost edition if budget is a constraint. However, small companies can stick to simple, free alternatives such as WordPress blogs or Wikis. Good old MS Word also can generate basic HTML help files for you.

Author’s Tip: Managing large software products with regular upgrade versions can be a major challenge for technical writers as they have to be in sync with the product change history. Help files often show configurable user-defined variables that are repeated several times throughout the help documentation. (For example, a variable such as “Sleep time after inactivity” is set to 30 sec in the previous version, to be set to 1 min in the upgrade.) The RoboHelp project would take care of updating the variable value throughout the help files!

4. Notepad++

A very effective beginner’s HTML editor. Most people learn the basics of HTML programming on this technical writing tool. If your software product does not require very heavy online help documentation, for making help files of medium size, this tool is more than sufficient.
Its customizable GUI allows for easy editing, it supports WYSIWYG for printing, and also has multi-language support options.

Author’s Tip: Notepad++ comes with a rich set of plug-ins. Multi-clipboard, Code Compare, Auto-Save are some popular ones. Technical writers need to pick the right set of plug-ins, which can transform an ordinary beginner’s editor to a viable option for online help editing.

5. WordPress

The go-to place if you want to have a technical documentation for your product in the form of blogs. WordPress is an open-source, free, online content management platform. Blogs written on WordPress can either be accessed directly from the WordPress blog URL or can be integrated into your company website.

This article itself is hosted on the WordPress blog called Whatfix Academy. If the goal is to publish online content about your company and associated technologies regularly, then set up a WordPress blog account. Blogs can also capture user responses in the form of comments and likes, which makes it easier to engage with your target audience and sense their appreciation for your product.

Author’s Tip: Blogs in isolation may not gather sufficient eyeballs. So, write your blog first, promote your blog on social media platforms next and finally measure the viewership/responses before getting on with the next set of blogs!

6. Adobe Photoshop

One tool which most technical writers across the industry swear by. It is the world’s most popular image editing tool for creating and editing photos and raster (pixel) based artwork. Can be used to create user interface designs, web pages, banner ads, video graphics, editing pictures for print, manipulating an image, superimposing one image on another, refining a photograph to iron out imperfections, correcting lighting issues, and more. Image editing process is reversible and incremental so that changes can be rolled back easily.

Author’s Tip: For professional designers, who are constantly in need of an image editing tool, there is almost no replacement to Adobe Photoshop. However, if you are an occasional user, try GIMP which is open source. It does support only RGB color schemes whereas Photoshop also supports CMYK (CYAN YELLOW MAGENTA BLACK) color mode. And the learning curve is higher for GIMP, but its free while Photoshop costs a bomb!

7. Adobe Illustrator

Tool for creating and editing vector-based illustrations such as logos and brand marks or other design elements. Graphic designers often make the mistake of designing their product logos on Photoshop. But the same logo needs to be printed on visiting cards, as well as massive advertisement billboards. So, image scaling without losing clarity is the key here, which vector graphics-based imaging tools achieve. Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw are the leading technical writing tools technical writing in this space.

Author’s Tip: This tool is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud solution with expensive monthly rentals. Free alternative technical writing tools like Inkscape or Affinity Designer can do the job equally well with SVG formats. Unless you require all major technical writing tools that are part of this solution (Photoshop, InDesign, etc), this tool is not a must-have.

8. Microsoft Visio

A popular diagramming tool used in engineering applications design. Technical writers often need to design flowcharts, architectural diagrams, electrical circuit diagrams, software product design, and so on. Visio is a convenient aid for this.

It is an IEEE compliant technical writing tool that conforms to software industry standards such as UML (Unified Modeling Language) and BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation).

Authors’ Tip: Visio has not been part of the traditional Microsoft Office suite, has always been sold separately similar to MS Project. But a very recent announcement from Microsoft says that online subscribers of Office 365 can now access Visio also.

9. Windows Snipping Tool

If you are looking for screen capture options that are more sophisticated than PrntScr on your keyboard, Snipping Tool is a good choice.

Apart from full-screen capture, you can also capture freehand crops, or partial screen area crops. To capture still images from videos, use the delay option so that the exact frame can be saved as an image.

Authors’ Tip: It is part of the Windows suite of software, but may not be enabled by default in some editions of Windows.

10. Windows Movie Maker

A simple video editing tool that technical writers can use to make their product demo videos. It is part of the Windows Essentials suite. However, since January 2017, this software has been discontinued, without the announcement of a proper replacement. So, all those users with older Windows versions, thank your lucky stars.

Authors’ Tip: Videos and audio clippings can be arranged and edited in a storyboard view, frame by frame. Or a series of still images can be stretched on a timeline. Audio voiceovers meshed with background sounds can give your videos a sophisticated edge.

11. Powtoon

Technical writing is increasingly becoming visual. Animated videos are an excellent way to capture user attention and pass on the message in an engaging way. Powtoon is a good web-based animation tool, sold as a SaaS product. Animated presentations and explainer videos can be created using this tool for free. However, the videos created with the free version would carry a ‘Powtoon’ watermark.

Authors’ Tip: If the technical writing is not for official purposes, it perfectly OK to use the free version of this tool. However, for a nominal rental, you could get the premium version which allows you to create videos without the watermark and several other features.

12. Prezi

An unconventional take on making demos in the form of a video presentation. Unlike Powerpoint, where content is rigidly divided into slides, Prezi gives you just one massive blank canvas. You can go about writing, drawing on it as you please. Zooming in or out of the content in focus and shifting focus from one frame to another on the same canvas – is how you make a continuous video presentation.

Authors’ Tip: Apart from the free version, there is a student trial version that is also free which has almost all the features of the paid version. Pick that one.

13. Microsoft Word

It does feel rather silly to write about the ubiquitous MS Word. But however commonplace it may be in our daily digital lives, it still happens to be the best friend of a technical writer. With easy conversion between PDF and DOC formats, the simple combination of Word and Adobe Acrobat Reader is not to be taken lightly. This article might be about all the fancy technical writing tools in the world, but it is being written using – the humble MS Word.

Authors’ Tip: Experiment with the various document templates that Word has on offer. They help to make your document look appropriate for the purpose intended – as marketing flyers, technical whitepapers, troubleshooting guides, and so on.

14. Kingsoft WPS Office

MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are known to be the most used technical writing software tools, miles ahead of alternatives available. Only the Android revolution has slowed down the MS Office juggernaut a little. And given a position of prominence to Kingsoft Office, a reasonable and free alternative to MS Office.

Authors’ Tip: There are a few nuanced features that WPS Writer does not support – Thesaurus being one of them. Thesaurus is an important feature for technical writers as we are constantly looking for better words to express the same points in different technical documents!

15. Google Docs

In a world that is increasingly turning to a handy mobile phone to read documents, rather than take the trouble of powering the computer on, Google Docs is slowly gaining prominence. Creating documents from scratch would not be convenient on Google Docs, but collaborative review and editing can be done efficiently through this cloud-based alternative to MS Office.

Author’s Tip: Its seamless integration with Gmail and Google Drive makes it even more attractive. As a technical writer, you would stick to sophisticated word processing tools. But your product manager who might be on the move all the time is sure to catch up on his reviews on his phone, in all probability.

What is Technical Writing?

So, let me start off with the basic question — what exactly is technical writing?

Before going into knowing about the tools for technical writing, let’s get the context right. Technical writing is the art of explaining how to use a technology to a non-expert user using easy-to-understand language.

In a more generic way, technical writing means technical communication — to convey complex information in a simple format.

Conclusion

You always need to master your skills. This is good because you should never be complacent, but it is also hard to keep up with the changes which are happening around us all of the time. The one thing that will always help is if you can find ways to make things easier. And when we are talking about learning, there are many different methods available right now and this includes understanding what technical documentation tools free might be able to offer you and others.

There are many tools that help an individual write technical documentation. However, to find the best software to write technical documentation, you have to try several options, and then evaluate each one based on your specific needs. There are also tools that you may already be familiar with that may offer the additional capabilities you need. This article will take a look at eight different software types as well as a few applications that can help you streamline the process so that you can produce quality work and keep track of important information, such as change logs and versioning details.