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Welcome to the Doc-To-Help video tutorial series. Today I’d like to take you on a
quick tour of Doc-To-Help’s interface. I think you will find it familiar and easy
to use – plus, Doc-To-Help provides a dynamic help pane, super tooltips, and all sorts of
user assistance – including videos -- to make your life easier.
Doc-To-Help has four quadrants that all work together to make authoring and building your
outputs quick and easy. They are: The Ribbons, Accordion Panes, Windows, and Dynamic Help
Let’s start with the ribbons. Doc-To-Help features Microsoft® Office style ribbons.
The File, Home, Topics, and Project tabs are displayed by default – the Editor, Insert,
and Table tabs appear only when you open a document in Doc-To-Help’s Built-In HTML5
Content editor. Each ribbon is divided into logical ribbon
groups, and many dialog boxes are opened directly from ribbon groups using dialog box launchers.
You can hover over any button to display its SuperTooltip. These tooltips are a great way
to learn what a button will do without even clicking on it.
Just a quick hint – in Doc-To-Help, you will use the Home ribbon often, because that
is where you choose and build your outputs. Choose what you want to build here … And
click here to build it.
Next, let’s look at the Accordion Panes. They are used to manage your documents, table
of contents, index, and more. The Documents pane is where all of your project
documents are organized. A project can contain as many documents as you like, and they can
be Word, or Content editor documents. Your project can contain a single type of document,
or a mixture of both types. Documents can be added to your project two
ways – you can click the Add Existing Document button to import existing documents, or you
can create a new document by choosing the Create New document button. Change your mind?
Documents can be rearranged in the Documents pane with the arrow keys.
To open any document, just double-click on it. Word documents will open in Word, and
Content editor documents will open in Doc-To-Help. On to the Contents pane...
Doc-To-Help builds your Table of Contents for you automatically, but you can customize
it here by rearranging topics, and adding Topics from the Topics pane.
If you want to roll back to your original TOC, just click the Rebuild Table of Contents
button. You can manage your index entries in the Index
and Groups Pane. If you’d like, you can add index keywords right here, or you can
do it while writing your documents. The Related Topics pane makes it simple to
manage ‘See also’ links in your online Help. Doc-To-Help creates these links for
you automatically, but you can add additional links by simply dragging them in from the
Topics pane.
Doc-To-Help’s windows are the next section we will look at.
The Start Page contains shortcuts you can use to Create and Open projects, as well as
open your most recent projects. This page also contains links to videos and documentation.
You’ve already seen the Topics window. This is where you manage your topics. You can drag
and drop them into the Contents, Index, and Related topics panes, rearrange them, and
customize the view to your liking. You can even edit in the Topics window … Context
IDs for context-sensitive Help can be added right here.
The Outputs window is displayed when you click the “Build” button.
It displays the progress of your build, and if there are any issues --such as broken links--
they are displayed here. Double-click on an error message to quickly troubleshoot the
problem. If you choose to use Doc-To-Help’s built-in editor, each topic will open up in
its own window. And the Editor, Insert, and Table ribbons will open so you can edit your
documents.
And now, the last quadrant … As you navigate the interface, the Dynamic Help pane will
display relevant user assistance. After you have become comfortable in Doc-To-Help, you
can turn Dynamic Help off by clicking here. If you develop Help for software applications,
and are interested in adding a Dynamic Help to your apps, you’ll be happy to learn that
when you buy Doc-To-Help, the DynamicHelp control is included for free. Dynamic Help
is a dot-NET WinForms control. While we are here, there are two other icons
you should know about. This icon opens the entire online help system
for Doc-To-Help. And this button opens the Getting Started
Wizard. The Getting Started Wizard helps you create
new projects in a few clicks, plus open existing projects and samples. It also includes handy
links to additional user assistance.
That’s all for now, but there is so much more we can talk about … including collaboration
with SharePoint, Responsive output, and more … see the Video page on Doc-To-Help.com
to check out our library of tutorial videos.
To learn more and download a free trial, go to Doc-To-Help.com. I’m Nicky Bleiel. Thanks
for watching, and thanks for choosing Doc-To-Help.