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Subject:RE: Timeframe for creating Online Help System From:technical -at- theverbalist -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 13 Jan 2005 14:47:43 -0700
:: Maybe you could ...develop a navigation system that will let the
:: user find the file they need as easily as possible?
Here's a maybe helpful idea to make it a little easier for your users to
find what they need...
I work with a large set of large docs that currently get shipped to
clients as PDFs. To make it easier for the clients to figure out which doc
has the information they need, I did two things, and then added the two
things together.
First thing, I added a paragraph under each chapter heading that describes
the content and intent of the chapter and gave that paragraph the style
"Description". Then I created a Table of Contents that includes the
Description style, so now chapters in the ToC have a description of the
feature or function that they are about, giving the user a bit more
context.
Second thing, I created a Master Document List that lists the document
names, as well as a list of the document chapters and their descriptions,
using the ToC-with-description, so users can determine where information
is from one central location. I added hyperlinks from the document title
to the document, so it's easy to open the doc you want.
This involved a bit of fiddling with the ToC settings and stuff, but if
you think this would help you I'd be happy to write out the process I
used...
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