Create help and user documentation for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, Visual Basic 6.0 and Microsoft Access
 
 

Help generator
Help Editor
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Windows HTML Help
Web based help
User documentation

How does the Help Generator work?

create html help helpfileThe generator scans your application and

  • creates HTML Help files and screenshots for each topic in your help system,
  • sets the HelpContextId property for each processed form,
  • creates the necessary project files (including table of contents and index),
  • links the help file to your application.

Each form in your application is analyzed in detail in terms of controls, menu, tab order etcetera and presented as a perfectly organized HTML page. After the HTML files have been generated you can use your favorite HTML editor to add the explanatory text and make the additional pages you require. The general high quality framework has already been set up for you. By the way, one of the great things with HTML help is that you can publish the result to your website too. The Help compiler (HHC) in MS HTML Help Workshop (HHW) is used to create the Help file.

What's on the menu?

The menu gives easy access to the main steps you need to go thru when making HTML Help or creating the documentation.

HTML Help Generator: generates all help files and links them to your application:

.htm Topic pages
.bmp/jpg Images
.hhp HTML Help Project File
.hhc Help Contents file, contents tree
.hhk Help Index file relating keywords to topic pages
.h Mapping between topic pages and HelpContextIds

Take Screenshot: take screenshots during runtime of the application and easily integrate these images (and resolve some hotspot differences) with the generated help.

Open Help Project: Edit help project, recompile help, create user or technical documentation in MS Word.

Explore Help Folder: in Explorer, gives direct access to the generated HTML topic files. Open this folder if you want to do direct editing on your generated pages, e.g. using WordPad. If you have FrontPage it is better to start with that.

Recompile Help Project: after having  made changes (added text, new images) you will have to recompile the help Project to create the new HTML Help (chm-file). Also copies the help file to the same folder as you application is in.

Export to Word: Creates a Word document containing all info in the HTML files (including images); to use it as user or technical documentation.