Wiki Life: Reusable Parts

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Wednesday - Wiki Life series again!

Screenshots are useful, aren't they? Giving a visual example in the middle of the explanation of a more or less complex technical feature makes understanding easier for the readers.

But what can you do when you have (or someone else has) a nice screenshot or image somewhere in a TechNet Wiki page, which should be displayed in other articles as well? Especially, when you need the same formatting - border width, image width and height settings, and so on? Uploading the image and setting its properties multiple times, hoping that there will be no mistakes... - there is an easier way in TechNet Wiki! Just reuse the code of the images!

To give at least one example: compare the HTML code of SSIS Pivot Transformation (en-US) and SSIS Pivot transzformáció (hu-HU). You can do it by visiting both pages, clicking on "EDIT" after logging in, and switching to HTML edit mode with the "<> HTML" button at the bottom of the editor (next to the Design button):

You will see the same references in the src property of the <img> tags (in case of the same screenshots, of course):

If you copy this part of the original page and insert to your new one, you'll have the same image with the same formatting in seconds.

Of course, when you're translating, you can start with copying and pasting the whole HTML code of the source page, and edit the text only in Design mode - but don't forget that you reused all images in this case, too! :) Next time, when you have to update a reused image (note to myself, the screenshots of the SSIS transformation pages should be updated to SSIS 2012 now), I'm sure that you will update them this way - uploading a new one, and reusing its HTML code piece. It will save you a lot of time.

Have fun with TechNet Wiki!

Zoli