Using the Tools

I've been teaching a six-week course on creating your first information products. I have been blessed with a talented group of people, who are truly serious about getting their products created and ready to market. Each of them is working hard, keeping on track.

One of the things that has surprised me has been the little things that they are thrilled to learn. For example, as we began to put together their tips booklets, we took a Word document and converted it to an Adobe Acrobat PDF. But there were a lot of operations in Word that were new to them. So I created Camtasia videos to show them how to do those operations.

And that's when it occurred to me - most of us don't learn to use the tools we already have on our desktop. For example, in Microsoft Word can you:

• insert a graphic
• wrap text around the graphic
• use different heading sizes to mark the text so that it automatically creates a table of contents when converted to a PDF
• use the thesaurus to make your writing more interesting
• insert a header and footer to "dress up" your document

Those are just the basics for document preparation. If you're serious about creating information products, you'll need all of those skills.

Just a heads up - start learning to use the tools on your desktop. It will save you time in the long run.