Variable concepts

- [Narrator] You may often find yourself working…with material that may change,…such as a product name that changes…from a pre-release code name to the final release name.…For example, here's a slide with some text…and the word 'longhorn', which happens to be…the pre-release code name for a new piece of software…and then marketing calls you up and says,…"We changed the name to 'vista'."…So the normal practice would be…to do a search and replace for longhorn…and replace it with vista,…but this can be tedious and it's also subject to error…if you misspelled longhorn someplace.…

So instead you can use what are called variables.…And a variable is a placeholder for content.…So instead of typing the product name, for example,…you might create a variable called productname_variable.…You would replace the product name with the variable.…Users would not see the variable…but instead they would see the variable value.…So if you said that…the productname_variable value was longhorn,…then in the text users would see…what appears to be the word longhorn…