Creating a Help system

[christheancient]

One or two of you may have noticed me popping around the forum asking for help with a database I'm building. To all those who wanted to, and did, help, many thanks. I'd be in deep trouble and well out of my depth if you hadn't. Thinks... I used to thing Access was fairly easy in the old days when I first did very simple databases. Now I know better.

Anyway, my (yet another) request for help...

I have seen in many of the examples in Access help that you can seemingly design your own database specific help system.

Simple question (Oh that the answer was probably that simple)... How? Do you need a special extra or what?

Ta!

Chris

 

[boblarson]

Okay, first up - What is available?

There are many help file creation tools out there and that work just fine. Microsoft has an HTML Help Workshop tool that you can download from their site and use for free. However, it is not all that "user-friendly" and easy to figure out.

I prefer using HelpScribble which is available at http://www.jgsoft.com and it costs $99 for a fully-licensed copy. They have a fully functioning demo version that you can try and use until you can pay for the non-demo. The only difference on the demo, is that you can not create HTML help files and on the Windows Help files there is an entry at the bottom of each subject that you create that has a blurb about the file being created with HelpScribble. And each compiled help file has a topic on HelpScribble included.

 

[christheancient]

Bob

Many thanks for that.

As soon as I can find a space to take time out and look over the weekend, I most definitely will. It should make such a difference to the "professionalism" of my final database.

Sorry to be a little slow getting back - but I had to the old caveman going out to hunt food bit today!

Thanks again

Chris