Help in Word 2007

[Normek]

Help in Word 97 was good if you knew what you were doing.
Help in Word 2000,2002 was much, much better. If you selected a cell in a
dialogue box and pressed the Help Question mark, you got directed help on
that feature.
Help in 2007 is abysmal with the Question Mark Opening a "Browse Word Help"
Dialogue box in most cases. Is there any way to configure Word help to be
more helpful, after the fashion of Word 2002 ?

 

[Tony Jollans]

No. I wish I could be more positive but Help seems to get progressively
worse with each release.

There are three aspects to it: the interface (how you get it), the mechanics
(how it decides what to give you), and the content (what it says). The
interface is, perhaps, improved. The mechanics, the search for topics,
simply isn't fit for purpose, and the content, if found, is, as often as
not, totally unhelpful.

 

[grammatim]

So who's responsible for the brilliant idea that a help file could
replace a printed manual?

Or, if you're cheap, a properly bookmarked, cross-referenced, and
indexed pdf like you get with Finale (the music-writing system)?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

What we keep being told (as [somewhat] reflected at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WheresTheManual.htm) is that any Help that
ships with the app can never be entirely accurate or up-to-date because
features are constantly being tweaked right up to RTM. The best way to keep
the Help updated is to publish articles online. We thought we had gotten
some assurance that updates to Help would be pushed back to the installed
program in Word 2007, but I'm not convinced this has happened. Instead,
online Help has just been more inextricably integrated into the installed
Help.

None of this would be so bad if there were a proper search mechanism
(combined with sensible indexing) that would allow you to find a Help topic
that actually helps. A large part of the problem is that so many features
are really undocumented. Word's User Assistance team just doesn't have
enough hours in the day to document features that are used by a relatively
small population. They have encouraged MVPs to write Help articles, but most
of us feel that we're already doing our bit through the NGs and our own Web
sites, and we don't feel inclined to do extra (unpaid) work for MS,
especially when the results are subject to MS's editing for content and
style.

So the bottom line is that "Get help from other users" (that is, these
newsgroups) remains the best source of help on obscure features. Of course,
it would be helpful if someone would tell *us* how to use them!

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

So who's responsible for the brilliant idea that a help file could
replace a printed manual?

Or, if you're cheap, a properly bookmarked, cross-referenced, and
indexed pdf like you get with Finale (the music-writing system)?