Re: Newbie question,

[Michelle Vina-Baltsas <Michelle_Vina-Baltsas -at- US -dot- CRAWCO -dot- COM>]

Hi all,
I am new to writing help but am playing with a demo version of ForeHelp a
question came to mind.  I am writing help for a homegrown program which has
no
documentation of any kind.  The program displays tabs for navigation from
screen
to screen.  In writing help should I address what the tabs are for i.e.,
Donor
The Donor screen allows you to input information about the person donating
Bone
Marrow.
I could also create pop-ups on each of the tabs.  What is standard in this
situation?
Sorry to ask such a baseline question but I am the only Tech Writer here.
Thanks
Juley
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Juley,

I believe you could use either.  Lots of questions, like this one, are
simply personal preference.  In the past, when I've documented a "tabbed"
interface, I've used jumps to get to the other screens.  Once they jumped
to the next screen, the description would follow.  They could easily get
back to the original screen by pressing the Back << button or by doing the
following.  Create jumps to each of the tabs, on each of tabbed windows,
so that they could flip back and forth, through all the tabs at will.  This
would require more work than just creating hot-spots in one screen sample,
but if time permits, I think it's a nice effect.   I've done this before,
and it was kinda cool.

I've only done this in RoboHelp, but I'm sure that ForeHelp is very
similar.

I'm interested to hear what other responses you receive.  By the way, I'm a
lone TW also, and questions like this plague me sometimes, so don't feel
bad.

Michelle


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