Help systems

In the early days of computing, the programmers of a sys-tem tended to also be its users and were thus intimately familiar with the program’s operation and command set. If not a programmer, the user of a mainframe program was probably at least a well-trained operator who could work with the aid of a brief summary or notes provided by the programmer. However, with the beginnings of office auto-mation in the 1970s and the growing use of desktop com-puters in office, home, and school in the 1980s, increasingly complex programs were being put in the hands of users who often had only minimal computer training (see com-puter literacy).

While programs often came with one or more tutorial or reference manuals, designers realized that offering help through the program itself would have some clear advan-tages. First, the user would not have to switch attention from the computer screen to look things up in a manual. Second, the help system could be programmed to not only provide information, but also to help the user find the informa-tion needed in a given situation. For example, related topics could be linked together and a searchable index provided.

Implementation

Programs running under the text-based MS-DOS of the 1980s tended to have only rudimentary help screens (often invoked by pressing the F1 key). Generally, these were lim-ited to brief summaries of commands and associated key combinations. However, with the growing use of Micro-soft Windows (and the similar Macintosh interface), a more complete and versatile help system was possible. Since these systems allowed multiple windows to be displayed on the screen, the user could consult help information while still seeing the program’s main screen. This allowed for trying a recommended procedure and observing the results.

Windows and Macintosh help systems also featured highlighted links in the text that could be used to jump to related topics (see hypertext and hypermedia). A topic word can also be typed into an index box, bringing up any matching topics. If all else fails, the entire help file could be indexed so that any word could be used to find matching topics.

More recent Windows programs also include wizards. A wizard is a step-by-step procedure for accomplishing a par-ticular task. For example, if a Microsoft Word user want to learn how to format text into multiple columns, the help sys-tem can offer a wizard that takes the user through the proce-dure of specifying the number of columns, column size, and so on. The steps can even be applied directly to the document with the wizard “driving” the program accordingly.

Recently, many programs have implemented their help in the form of Web pages, stored either on the user’s com-puter or at the vendor’s Web site (see html). HTML has the advantage that it is now a nearly universal format that can be used on a variety of platforms and (if hosted on a Web site) the help can be continually improved and updated. (Microsoft’s latest version of HTML Help has supplanted its original WinHelp, which is no longer supported by Vista.)

A variety of shareware and commercial help authoring systems such as RoboHelp are available to help developers create help in Windows or HTML format. UNIX systems, which have always included an on-line manual, now typi-cally offer HTML-based help as well.