In a number of recorded webinars and shorter videos, I’ve shown how the memoQ Regex Assistant, the library tool for organizing and managing expressions using plain language names, labels and descriptions, can import collections of prepared solutions to extend the functionality of your memoQ desktop software. But people still ask me what to do with all those library exports I’ve been giving away for a few years now.
This is a rather important skill for many of the tasks we deal with in checking our translations for some kinds of systematic format errors, and in the course modules for QA and the Regex Assistant I’ll be posting in the memoQuickies Substack, I’ll keep distributing new collections of useful expressions, so I put this three-minute video together as a quick help.
The format of this video is a little different than a typical technology tutorial. I posted another version of the video on YouTube yesterday, which has the same content, including the short “highlights” clip at the start, but lacks the text message letting viewers know that they’re about to see some key steps taken from somewhere in the middle of the recorded tutorial:
The Substack version of the video has that additional text on the suggestion of a colleague who found it a little disorienting to be plunged into the middle of the presentation right at the start. I hope that extra text is helpful.
But why am I doing this unusual thing at all? Why not just do a “normal” tutorial, maybe with a title screen and then the step-by-step procedure?
In longer videos, like recorded webinars, I usually try to make a table of contents so people can skip to the parts they need most and ignore parts that are of little interest. But in shorter videos of five minutes length or so, an index like that makes less sense. However, many times I want to review a tutorial I’ve seen before and just find one critical detail I’ve forgotten, and I often find myself skipping around, wasting time in an attempt to save some time. I don’t need to see the whole damned video again.
Or I’ll look at someone else’s video and be bored out of my skull with details I already master well. I only need maybe 30 seconds out of that 7 minute video, but where can I find that short bit?
I’m a politics junkie, and I follow quite a few commentators across the political spectrum, as well as news of the tragic war forced on our Ukrainian friends by the Russian aggressors. Many of the videos I watch use this “key moment clip” technique to draw viewers in and motivate them to watch a longer discussion that might run over an hour.
My purpose in adding key moment clips is just the opposite. If you know your way around memoQ pretty well, you probably don’t need to see my whole recording because you already know most of the contextual details, or you find my storytelling habits annoying and just want that one useful bit. So fine. You get that up front. And if you do need or want the rest of the story, then you know what the climax will be and maybe seeing it first as a spoiler will help you remember the lesson. I hope so anyway.
So…
Sorry for the telegraphically written options in the poll; that’s as much text as the Substack poll feature allows at present. Please have a look at both video versions above and let me know which of them you prefer or whether you think it would all work better without that highlights clip at the start. I’ll consider the results and any comments for future video productions.
My intent is to build learning tools for you and others that will make your work easier and allow you to learn and review effectively with a minimum of wasted time.
P.S. Based on suggestions from several colleagues, I’ve produced a third version which marks the preview of key steps in a different way. They thought this might reduce viewer confusion. What do you think?
Importing a Regex Assistant library