Best Practices in Context-Sensitive Online Help

[Sue McKinney <smckinn2001 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

All, 
I've been asked to present information on the best way to redesign our online help, currently NOT context-sensitive, to be context sensitive. In the past I've written help topics describing each dialog and linking to the associated tasks that can be performed. That way the procedures aren't cluttered with all the field explanations, and the procedural topics also link back to the associated dialog topics. Make sense? 
 
Or is there another way? The reason I might not just link to a procedure from each dialog is that a) there may be more than one task that can be performed from a certain dialog or b) an individual dialog may be only 1 step in a larger procedure.
 
Thanks, and please respond to me directly as well as to techwr-l as I'm on digest.
 
Sue McKinney


      
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help  
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

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