Re: What do you want from help? (was: Do online helps have chapter numbers)

["Sidney Oliver" <jsoliver -at- cox -dot- net>]

Greetings, everyone. I'm a lurker here and a very, very, very experienced 
(often frustrated) Help user.

I want comprehensive content, an intuitive, versatile search feature, and a 
commonsensical index that, by the way, uses the vocabulary the application 
uses and accurately references the options the application offers.

To find a good example of what I mean,  I just tried to use Help in Word 
2000. The office assistant sweetly popped up to inquire how I'd help to do a 
table. Only, I wasn't doing a table. I had just opened a blank document and 
hadn't typed a thing. Why the office assistant got the notion that I'd like 
to do a table mystifies me.

Then, after three or four more passes just to get TO the Help menu--which I 
never managed to do--I typed Help in the search function and found a menu 
that includes help to turn off the office assistant. Unfortunately, the 
steps shown in Help don't appear where they're supposed to appear in my 
application.  I was told to choose an option that doesn't exist--and yes, I 
had fully extended the drop-down menu.

Maybe Microsoft should hire ME--not to write the Help feature <shudder> but 
to demonstrate what "intuitive" and "commonsensical" means to the moderately 
experienced Word user. And maybe Microsoft should also do some basic quality 
control!
Sidney


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steven Brown" <stevenabrown -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 9:24 AM
Subject: Re: What do you want from help? (was: Do online helps have chapter 
numbers)