[Lazarus] Building help files: the nitty-gritty

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 18 July 2012 20:15, Mark Morgan Lloyd
<markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
> the same time I think I favour properly-designed forms and components which
> don't need on-screen help.

Some of our apps have advanced features. eg: Dynamic views that the
user can customise, thus changing what they see, and how the data is
presented. We supply some default views, which they can use to base
there views on, or create new views from scratch. The "what is a
view", and "how to create your own views" are things that appear in
the application help. Then we also have some help and transaction
examples in our accounting section of the application. People learn
best by example - thus, that is in the application help. We don't
display detailed help per widget, but rather an overview of each
dialog, and what is is for. And more detailed help for things like the
two examples I listed above.


> Having a decent manual, possibly with weak linkage to the app so that it
> opens on the right page (something that PDF is bad at) is a different issue.

We even have one-to-one training sessions on our applications and
business practices (we are a franchise business)... and amazingly we
still get phone calls about certain things. :)


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


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