I rarely read actual books these days. I start to feel sad about it until I rationalize that I'm reading tomes of content through web pages, emails, and social networks every day. Truly there's nothing like a few hours of down-time and a good work of fiction, but when you're tasked with managing and maintaining technology, there's very little time left to enjoy such things.
Microsoft has long provided the TechNet Library, which is an online, accumulated mass of product manuals. And while it's not a great work of fiction, it's an extremely valuable work to those of us who need to read and learn the important pieces required to implement Microsoft technologies. Sifting through the volumes of information there can be daunting and sometimes it takes more time to find exactly what you need than it does to actually implement the topic at hand. In the past, you'd find what you needed and either bookmark the material, or copy/paste the content into a Word document for reading later on.
Related: Stock Your Bathroom Reading Library Using the Microsoft E-Book Gallery
Microsoft has added a neat function of the TechNet Library you may not be aware of. The Export function of the TechNet Library allows you to collect important pieces as you locate them and then save the content into your own, customized and personalized eBook.
How to do it
- Jump out to the TechNet Library
- Enter Export Mode by clicking the Export button…
- Then, click the Start button when provided.
- A new Export mode menu bar will now be available.
As the menu bar states, you can right-click on a TechNet Library topic to add entire sections or multiple docs, or you can just dig down into the various topics and subtopics and use the Add this page to your collection.
Once you're done selecting topics and content, click the Manage pages menu item and you'll be whisked away to the Export page where you'll be provided with a list of Advanced Options, the opportunity to further organize your collection by renaming the topics into customized chapters, and also the ability to choose to export your collected pages as an Adobe format (PDF) file or in HTML.
