Help Features

Online help provides concepts, terms, and procedures you need to perform product-related tasks.

The help viewer uses a familiar three-pane scheme with the following elements:

Menus and a toolbar-Point to a toolbar button for a description of the tool.

Navigation pane-Locate topics from the Contents, Index, and Search tabs.

Content pane-View the contents of the selected topic. Previous and Next links at the top and bottom of each topic allow you to browse the help system.

Note

The help viewer was designed to comply with industry-standard accessibility requirements. All elements are clearly labeled, hyperlinks are underlined in the HTML pages, and toolbar buttons have tooltips. In addition, the viewer supports keyboard access to all elements and operations. For keyboard equivalents of mouse actions, see Keyboard Navigation in the Help Viewer.

You can obtain context-sensitive help from your application by clicking the Help button in one of the windows or by pressing the F1 key (if available for your application).

The following table describes the main help features and lists how to access the features.

Help Features

Feature	Description	How To Access
Contents	Lists the topics in the help set. Select a title to view the corresponding topic. You can expand a folder to display the topics in that folder.	Contents tab
Index	Allows you to search for indexed topics. Start typing the term you want to locate. The index scrolls to the first keyword containing the text you typed. Select the index entry to view the topic. If the keyword contains a subentry, select the subentry instead. The index feature is not case-sensitive; you can enter any combination of upper- and lower-case letters.	Index tab
Search	Provides full-text search for terms in the help system. Enter the term, word or word fragment you want to locate and then select Search. If you enter more than one term, help locates topics containing any of the terms you entered. Select the Case sensitive checkbox to locate only terms that match the exact capitalization of the text you entered. If more than one help system is loaded in the viewer, you can limit the search to a single help set by selecting that help set in the Select help set listbox.	Search tab
Synchronize	Synchronizes the Contents tab with the topic currently displayed. Use this feature after browsing, searching, or displaying help from the application’s Help button. When using these methods to access a topic, the topic is not highlighted in the Contents tab. You can synchronize the view so the current topic is highlighted in the Contents tab.	View menu and toolbar button
Hide/Show Navigation Tabs	Hides or displays the navigation pane that contains the Contents, Index, and Search tabs. Selecting the Hide Navigation Tabs toolbar button hides the navigation pane and toggles the button to Show Navigation Tabs. Select Show Navigation Tabs to display the pane again.	Options menu and toolbar button (two views)
Back/Forward	Lets you view topics in the order they appeared in the current viewing session. The Back and Forward button do not necessarily correspond to the browse sequence of the help topics. (To go to the previous or next topic in sequence, click the Previous or Next link in a topic.)	View menu and toolbar buttons
Print	Allows you to print the current topic. (Available if your product supports the printing of help topics.)	File menu and toolbar button
Find/Find Next/ Find Previous	Allows you to locate a phrase, word, or word fragment within the current topic.	Edit menu