Product Reviews

Developing help is an essential component of any software deployment. Effective, well-designed Help files not only reduce the burden on your customer support team, but also give your customers a positive impression of you. Beyond this, files in Windows Help format are also useful for distributing reference material and even e-books.

A Windows Help file is created by compiling a series of RTF files that are marked to indicate keywords, topics and glossary items. The RoboHelp range of products automate this process, allowing you to concentrate on the content and structure of your Help file. RoboHelp for Word is the entry-level offering and, not surprisingly, integrates with Microsoft Word.

RoboHelp for Word can create Help files in the WinHelp 4 format for compatibility with 32-bit versions of Windows and, less helpfully, in Windows 3.1's WinHelp 3 format. You can also output in Microsoft's HTML Help format for Windows 98 and above, as well as to the WebHelp format, which is cross-platform compatible and therefore ideal for Linux, Mac or Web-deployed apps.

RoboHelp is compatible with Word 95 to 2002/XP. It works by installing alongside the application a sophisticated template containing a range of macros that turn Word into a fully fledged Help editor.

At launch, RoboHelp opens with Word, which starts a RoboHelp.dot template. I'm usually uncomfortable about using two applications to do a single job, but in this case it works exceptionally well. Help projects are made up of one or more Books that can be divided into Sub-books and Topics. Topics are the individual pages that contain text, hotspots, images, pop-ups and even multimedia elements.

To create your Help file, you begin by using the Table of Contents view to add Books, Sub-books and Topics. RoboHelp Explorer keeps track of the Help file's structure and adds the appropriate tags to the Word document. A custom toolbar installed as part of RoboHelp.dot allows the addition of text, images, pop-ups, sounds

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and video sequences to the topics within Word.

To link two topics, highlight the link text, click on the Link icon and select the destination topic. RoboHelp works out which topic you want to link to by comparing the link text to the list of topic titles. Creating a new pop-up window is achieved in the same way, making the generation of glossary entries simple. Similarly, adding hotspots to images is a matter of visually defining the areas and linking them to other topics or pop-ups.

RoboHelp allows you to import Word files to make the most of existing documentation. Once imported, it offers the option to split the documents into topics based on their heading styles. If you've been using Word's headings consistently, this can make the process automatic. By using the Table of Contents view in RoboHelp Explorer, drag and drop the topics into the appropriate places in the structure.

Once you've added content, RoboHelp compiles your Help file in the selected format. It's simple to choose an alternative format, so publishing across multiple platforms, offline and online can be achieved from a single source file. The process takes only seconds for a small project, but RoboHelp also offers ActiveTest, a feature that allows you to immediately see the current topic in its Help format without having to compile the whole file.

RoboHelp includes Wizards to walk you through the process of generating an index and browsing sequences, as well as creating and publishing WebHelp. You can also print a range of reports, the most important being the Diagnostics Report, which analyses your Help file and identifies errors including missing links, Map IDs and images.

RoboHelp for Word contains just about every feature that most developers are likely to need. Its big brother, RoboHelp for Office - priced at £631 - adds a number of convenient features, such as the ability to resize graphics before importing them, along with HTML-editing tools and, perhaps most usefully, a 'What's This?' contextual help generator. Top of the range is RoboHelp Enterprise at £1,104, which adds server components, team-authoring support and real-time Help updates.

Having spent many a long hour creating Help files by hand in the past, I can fully endorse RoboHelp. The Word incarnation seems to be the best-value edition for most developers. The price may seem excessive - after all, you may have to spend more on the help-authoring system than on your programming language. But the investment will repay itself the first time you use it, both in saved time and increased user satisfaction.