Fixing Help
It seems to be universally understood that Help in Office products gets worse with every release. I’m still using 2003 almost exclusively, but I haven’t heard anyone shouting from the roof tops about the improvements in 2007’s Help. I’ve been thinking about help in general and what makes a good help system.
Leaders in the Field
Who has good help? I’m struggling to name an application that has truly useful help. I use the suite of Office apps, Quickbooks, Agent, Foxit, ACT!, AssetKeeper, irfanView, jetAudio, Firefox, PDFCreator, SnagIt, and others. I can’t hold any of them up as a shining example of how to do it. Maybe the program that is the most intuitive wins because you aren’t forced to look at help. Maybe help doesn’t really matter because I obviously use a lot of apps with crappy help systems.
One of the things I look for in a new program is community. I want to know who is posting questions in the wild and how frequently. If you want to evaluate a new product, don’t read the testimonials on the company’s website, see if they have an active community. In most cases, you don’t even need to care what people are saying. If there’s an active community, it’s generally a positive. At best it means that a lot of people have chosen the software. At worst, it means that the software was thrust unwanted on a lot of people, but those people are still using it and creating workarounds and such.
Does that mean that I shouldn’t complain about help? Should I just accept that help will always be crappy? Should I accept that the only real help I’ll ever get is in user-to-user situations?
Delivery
There are two main aspects to help; delivery and content. Back in the old days, I would press F1 and a new window would appears. It would have a table of contents, and index, and a window with some content in it. I would read the content, and switch back to Excel to implement my new found knowledge. At some point in the last 10 years, a user told Microsoft that they didn’t like switching back and forth between help and the app. They couldn’t see the example in help while they were typing in Excel. So MS made the help window float on top of the app. Eventually it ended up in the Task Pane. Boy do I miss the table of contents. Now it seems that you have to know at least part of the answer so you can search for the right thing.
The modal help window has its merits. And the made up story about its genesis is logical. As for help that phones home, I have no logical story. What user said “I don’t like when my help is out of date.”? I’m sure people complained of errors in the help file and MS decided to move the content to the web so they could fix errors quickly. But how big of a problem was that really? I was perfectly happy with offline help and I wouldn’t mind seeing it come back.
Then there’s the unwanted help situation. Have you ever entered a circular reference in Excel? If you haven’t, you get an error message which you are required to clear. Once cleared, you get a help window, which you are required to close. Oh, you may read that help window the first time you do it, but you certainly aren’t reading it more than once. This has to be the worst help delivery system in human history. Unless the idea is to train me not to enter circular references because the consequences are so painful. If that’s the case, then its the best system.
Here’s what I want in a help system. I want to press F1 and get a small form.
If I’m in a cell editing, put the worksheet function name I’m working on in the text box. Allow me to browse the contents and index. Show me decent search results when I search, and always allow me to go to the contents or index pages. I don’t need to see articles from MSDN. If I have an internet connection, I’ll use it with my browser. I want fast, fast, fast. I don’t want it to take the same amount of time to open help as it did Excel - especially if I hit F1 on accident and I’m going to cancel.
Content
I’ve probably ranted enough for one day, but there’s this other side of help called content. There is no excuse for a poor delivery system, but can the same be said about content? In some cases, yes. We’ve all seen those help systems that list the menu choices. Those are horrible. I was reading the instructions for my new remote (I got a new LCD TV for Christmas). It had entries like: To adjust the Brightness, select Brightness from the menu and use the Channel Up and Channel Down keys. Oh really? That’s how you adjust the brightness? What it doesn’t tell me is what to set the brightness to, what the heck brightness is, and why I would want to be adjusting it in the first place.
That’s an example of how bad it can be, and Excel help is a step up. Excel help gives you the syntax (that’s important) and sometimes a nice explanation of the arguments, and usually the worst example possible. Outside of reminding myself what the syntax is, I’m usually better off searching the internet for real life examples that reading the help. I find it kind of difficult to bash the help writers too much, because I don’t think I’d do a better job. Writing help has to be really difficult. The best advice I can give help writers is to ask “why” after you ask “how”. Understand why the user is looking at this help page.
What are the characteristics of a good help system? Do you have examples of apps that have great help? Leave a comment.
Scott:
Surprisingly my best experience with help has been Word. 90% of the time I search for a basic question I get a very good answer in one of the top few results.
21 December 2007, 3:59 pmJohan Nordberg:
I agree with you 100%. Help in most applications is crap. Often really pointless, like “To print a document, press the print button”. Gee.. Thanks..
In Office the search is really bad to. A randomizer would probably do a better job finding the correct information. Atleast it feels that way when you’r trying to find something using the free text search.
I always use Google to find information, even if I know it’s on MSDN or Office Online. Instead of searching on msdn, I use the “site:” search hint on Google. In my experience that gives me more accuracy than the in-site search.
Blogs are a great source of information! Forums are really good to, but there are to many (bad) forums with alot of questions, but no answers. The problem with blogs is that it’s just the blog owner that can start new diskussions.
I would really like to see a good wiki for each Office program and for developing office customizations. Just imagine what you and the other active Excel geeks with blogs could create for Excel! That would be truly amazing!
// Johan
21 December 2007, 4:02 pmBrett:
especially if I hit F1 on accident and I’m going to cancel
I’ve got fat fingers somtimes and Help(F1) positioned next to F2 is terrible. I use newsgroups and blogs to look for good exmaples. Help is usually this Q: Where is the gas? A: In the gas tank. Q: where is the gas tank? A:It’s holding the gas.
21 December 2007, 5:09 pmfzz:
The VBE help system hasn’t been as anti-improved as Excel’s.
FWIW, both Quattro Pro’s and 1-2-3’s help systems were better than Excels back in .HLP days. 1-2-3’s is still pretty good, but QP’s has become garbage since it became HTML Help. My main gauge for ‘good’ is context sensitivity. In 1-2-3, start typing the cell formula @IF(@SUM(, press [F1] and the help system will display help on the @SUM function. Put the cursor on any function name in Edit mode, and pressing [F1] will display help on that function. OTOH, if you’re editing a classic macro, pressing [F1] will bring up help on the current macro command if the classic macro help file is installed.
What I can’t understand is why MSFT can’t include an Index in the help system. And I really miss the Find tab in Excel 97’s help system, especially the ability to check what *I* consider to be relevant topics from a keyword search then running a Find Similar search.
As for current help systems’ web connectivity, it hasn’t led to a correction for, e.g., the RANK worksheet function:
“RANK(number,ref,order)
Number is the number whose rank you want to find.
Ref is an array of, or a reference to, a list of numbers.”
RANK’s second argument may ONLY be a range reference, like SUMIF’s and COUNTIF’s first arguments. This error has been around since Excel 4. Excel 2003 online help, at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052092311033.aspx
uses the same wording, as does Excel 2007’s at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP100625351033.aspx
There are other long standing errors in Excel’s documentation which haven’t been fixed in online help, so errata would seem not to be one of the advantages of online vs local help files.
21 December 2007, 5:36 pmDoug Jenkins:
Help in Excel 2007 has improved in some respects; for instance if you type =functionname F1, you now get help on the particular function you just typed, rather than the contents list to the entire help system, but it still reads like it was written for programmers rather than spreadsheet users. Microsoft could do worse than take a good look at the Lotus 123 help system, which has given easy to understand context sensitive help in response to F1 from day 1, and in the last release I have used (Rel 9.5) was still streets aheead of Excel in speed, usability and general helpfulness.
21 December 2007, 5:37 pmAnanda Sim:
There are several issues we can talk about on Microsoft Office Help. The classic to compare against is the Office 97 HLP engine. Somewhere in the mists of classic help were - ability to bookmark, a good index and a good TOC, automatic content restriction, good prediction of what you want - i.e. if you are asking about Range in Word, you don’t want Range in Excel. Office Help has gone steadily downhill since 97 - content is too diverse because there are too many different product topics responding when you type in a keyword, the TOC and index are polluted with nonsense and diverse entries. The bookmarking and TOC features have been impacted by the move to HTML and web concepts where it is easy to hyperlink and search on keyword but difficult to create a TOC without manual labour. Speed is a problem - the web online feature is of course slower than offline hard disk help but even on disk pages take time to appear - somehow index building of keywords have been delayed or something. The best Microsoft help is not in Office but in the Visual Studio 2005 or latest MSDN product. You can bookmark favourites and do a host of other things. Somehow, the Office team get a dumbed down, reduced functionality version. I don’t know why there is this distinction.
21 December 2007, 11:42 pmRon de Bruin:
I also agree with Dick for 100%
See my Google add-in
http://www.rondebruin.nl/Google.htm
I hope Google fix the Newsgroup Search soon.
22 December 2007, 2:00 amI will try to make it better next year
Simon Murphy:
I agree that help has deteriorated in each version.
22 December 2007, 5:16 amThe UI has become more integrated, interfering with our work. The content has been disassociated and moved to the web making it slow and inconvenient.
I have a local install of MSDN which I can use without it encroaching on my Excel window, the search is a bit weak though.
Google is probably the best help.
I’d like to see more, better examples in the help.
Jon Peltier:
I’m not sure if it’s really an “improvement” in Excel 2007’s help. I was developing something for 2003 & 2007 use, and the syntax explanation in 2003 was poor, and the example was totally irrelevant (I was looking for .Add for one object class, and the example was for adding nodes to a shape). In 2007 the syntax explanation was equally poor, but the irrelevant example was removed in favor of no example at all.
22 December 2007, 10:57 amJon Peltier:
Ron -
I fear Google will only make the newsgroups worse. Google groups used to be very good, but each successive revision has sucked more of the usefulness out of it.
22 December 2007, 10:59 amRon de Bruin:
Hi Jon
I agree but we have no other option.
22 December 2007, 6:24 pmMike Rosenblum:
I think that Office VBA help is quite good. It was always simple and to the point. And the new layout in Office 2007 is pretty darn nice.
However, for a *really* good help system, if you have Vista available to kick around, try the Help system on that. It is truly impressive. The difference is that the content is hands-down ten times better. I am really impressed with it…
22 December 2007, 6:29 pmDoug Glancy:
Ron and Jon,
What has happened to Google Groups anyway, do you know? Why do they show the same results over and over now?
22 December 2007, 10:49 pmRon de Bruin:
Hi Doug
I not know what the problem is.
23 December 2007, 6:09 amI send a few mails the last months to Google but never get feedback back.
jkpieterse:
What would really improve the 2007 Help experience is if one could update the offline content with new online content. For the rest: agree with everyone else, steady downhill all the way.
24 December 2007, 12:30 pmJim Cone:
Further to Ananda’s comments…
There is no reason to suffer with the current help
offerings. I still use XL97 help to much advantage for
every version up thru 2003. So it doesn’t have Split,
Round and InStrReverse but you already know that.
I use the following code (borrowing heavily from the Chip Pearson web site) to display xl97 help…
(of course you also need the help files)
Sub ShowExcelHelp()
Shell “c:\Windows\Winhlp32.exe Mainxl.hlp”, vbNormalFocus
End Sub
Sub ShowVBEHelp()
‘The help file for the VisualBasic Editor
Shell “c:\Windows\Winhlp32.exe Veenob3.hlp”, vbNormalFocus
End Sub
Sub ShowVisualBasicHelp()
‘The help file for Excel VBA
Shell “c:\Windows\Winhlp32.exe Vbaxl8.hlp”, vbNormalFocus
End Sub
Sub ShowOfficeVBAHelp()
25 December 2007, 3:46 pm‘The help file for VBA - includes above help file.
Shell “c:\Windows\Winhlp32.exe VEENUI3.HLP”, vbNormalFocus
End Sub
Ron de Bruin:
One thing is better in 2007
25 December 2007, 6:41 pmIt is easy to find the Topic ID for a help topic if you want to call that in a macro.
See the 2007 section on this page
http://www.rondebruin.nl/id.htm
Kevin Roth:
My least favorite help system change is the [?] button on the options dialogs. This applies to v2003. Go to Tools-Options and click on the question mark button in the upper-right corner. You end up with a help window that doesn’t even seem to know what tab you’re on! The old system would only show help for one control at a time (which was annoying), but the new system makes you go back and figure out what tab you’re looking at!!!
26 December 2007, 4:35 pmBrad Yundt:
I wonder what kind of help the users would create on their own? Following Johan Nordberg's suggestion, suppose the existing on-line help were turned into a Wiki, with users empowered to add their own clarifications and examples. Microsoft personnel would then serve in a role as moderator, capturing good user input into the master copy that is periodically given back to users on patch Tuesday.
One of my frustrations with the existing help system is the absence of explanation on keywords. You are forced to discover how to use them (and whether they are even useful) through trial and error. Suppose you want to select a set of worksheets, prior to printing them out. One way is to list them by name in a variant array. But if you are looping through the worksheets, you might prefer to add a worksheet to the current selection:
'Select every worksheet except Sheet2
Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim b As Boolean
For Each ws In Worksheets
Select Case ws.Name
Case "Sheet2"
Case Else
If b Then
ws.Select False 'Help in Excel 2003 and earlier won't way what False does
Else
ws.Select 'Help in Excel 2007 won't say True is default value
b = True
End If
End Select
Next
End Sub
Had I discovered on my own how the above feature worked, I just might be tempted to add the information to the on-line help. And the possibility that some other user had added useful information would be a good incentive to use on-line help as opposed to off-line.
Microsoft has already outsourced tech support on Office applications to volunteers on newsgroups and support forums. Why not outsource Help documentation, too?
26 December 2007, 5:29 pmMike Alexander:
Brad, that is an excellent idea!
27 December 2007, 11:55 amI believe there are enough passionate people out there to actually make the Help Wiki an excellent resource.
David Hale:
This is a great conversation. Thanks for starting it, Dick. I became the manager of the Office Developer Documentation group just after Office 2007 shipped, in December 2006. I should begin by acknowledging many of the good points raised in the post and ensuing comments. It is true that many of the thousands of reference topics in Excel developer help have not been updated in several versions. It is a little known fact that we have only one Programming Writer to create new content for Excel programmability features. (In fact, for a brief part of the release there wasn't a writer at all until my predecessor was able to hire someone.) Therefore, most of the time between the release was spent on documenting the new API's vs. updating the older ones.
Johan and Brad's idea of "outsourcing" portions of developer help to the community is an interesting one. Certainly, together we could create a better experience. Even if we had a dozen writers, I doubt that we (Microsoft) could come up with the variety and depth of samples and content that we could if hundreds of Excel devs around the world working together could. See the Office Dev Docs blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/OfficeDevDocs) for some insight into how we are analyzing usage data to prioritize updates to the existing content, as well as strategies we are hoping to use to build out community content.
As for the Wiki, are you familiar with the "Community Content" feature on MSDN Library? You can augment a topic on MSDN similar to the way suggested. For example, see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb214162.aspx. While this leaves some things to be improved (updates to the Office Online topics, for example), it is a step in the right directions, IMHO.
27 December 2007, 3:45 pmJon Peltier:
David -
Good to see a Microsoft rep here. Don't take any of the comments personally, but please take them seriously.
I've noticed the Office 2007 help may actually have been "downgraded", in that examples have been removed from many entries. The new parts of the OM, regarding specifically the formatting of shapes and charts, have to be better fleshed out, because now the pages refer to each other recursively without adding any comprehension (and the macro recorder doesn't record any of this stuff).
A weakness has always been the impression we get that the help content authors (and example code authors) have no direct experience using the products they are writing content about. The Community Content is an interesting addition which may help address this shortcoming, but I never seem to have time to add anything. I have been filling out the "did this page help" section with what I hope are constructive suggestions.
28 December 2007, 12:37 pmDoug Jenkins:
"(and the macro recorder doesn't record any of this stuff)."
Yes, this is a major annoyance, and presumably wouldn't take a huge amount of resources to fix.
We can (and I do) start up Excel 2000 to use the macro recorder to record some shapes, but we realy shouldn't have to do that, and it doesn't help us with features that are new to 2007.
Alternatively (or as well) a single location with a reasonably comprehensive selection of code samples for dealing with creating and formatting shapes would be a big help.
28 December 2007, 10:14 pmWilliam Bowe:
Normally I am the most peaceful, placid, easygoing person you could ever hope to meet. But as a regular user of Excel, my greatest ambition in life is to track down the person responsible for this "feature" and do them some very serious physical harm. I take it that it's not possible to check a box somewhere so it doesn't do this? I trawled through help a number of times trying to work out how this might be done, and have now come across this site while searching for a solution through a web search.
31 December 2007, 12:48 amTushar Mehta:
Dick and William: There is a Cancel button in the dialog box about circular references. Use it!
Also, one gets that warning only when one introduces a circular reference into a worksheet that current has none (*and* iterative calculation is not enabled). Once a circular reference exists, subsequent circular references raise no warning.
I checked the above two points in 2003 and 2007.
Out of curiosity, how would you improve on the current set up?
31 December 2007, 3:02 pmfzz:
Improve on the current circular reference functionality?
1. Make the Cancel button the default.
2. Put a checkbox in the dialog that will prevent the dialog from appearing again, much like other applications that come with a Top-of-the-Day feature provide a checkbox to disable it from appearing again. This would make the user's choice to dismiss the dialog a persistent setting rather than just a session setting.
3. Eliminate the Help button. Help is shown automatically when the user presses the OK button.
4. Make Help A LOT FASTER.
AFAIK, Excel is the only spreadsheet that displays a warning dialog upon detecting circular references. The others just put an indicator into their status bars.
31 December 2007, 3:41 pmTushar Mehta:
{shrug} All of this is arguing at the margins. There's a lot seriously broken with help but making this or that the default (you prefer A, I prefer B, she prefers C), adding a checkbox here or there (as I've already noted, the default is to provide a warning only when a circular reference is first introduced into a worksheet w/o one), removing a button (IIRC 2007 has only OK and Cancel) is essentially "six of one, half dozen of the other."
If that's all one has to complain about help, then MS has done an outstanding job.
And, I know it hasn't. There's a lot wrong, at least from my perspective. Though I am heartened that with 2007 MS seems to be placing people in charge who at least seem to be willing to listen to "experts" (I don't know how many others complained -- I know I did, loudly, and at every opportunity I got -- but a synced TOC is back with Office 2007!). Right or wrong, my sense is that too many of the Common Office Software people seem to either bury their noses in "it's all in the usage data we get" or live in an ivory tower and dream up scenarios of how they believe people should use Office.
31 December 2007, 5:19 pmJohn Michl:
My parents blessed me with a Mac Pro for Christmas - my first Mac. I've been very impressed with the help on the Mac (at least for Leopard OS; I don't have experience with other Mac OSs). Simple example, I was in the System Information area (similar to Windows Control panel) and was sure what icon to click to change some settings. I typed one word into the Spotlight search bar and immediately a bright white search light reflected on the most likely icon with two dimmer lights on two other potential icons. Other experiences with help have been great, as well. Excellent job being context relevant. Office:mac 2008 will be availble in two weeks so I'll check that out to see if it MS has adopted some of Apple's thoughts on the best way to provide help.
3 January 2008, 10:37 amjkpieterse:
Well, MS did strip off VBA from MAC Office 2008, so there's a big drawback there!!!
3 January 2008, 12:39 pmfzz:
Fortunately for Mac users, Apple rather than Microsoft controls the help delivery facilities. No doubt it's better. The bulk of this discussion is Windows-centric, where Microsoft (unfortunately) controls the help delivery facilities.
In re Tushar's shrug, there are MANY aspects of Excel that could use more extensive user configuration options. The Help system is definitely one of them. In re circular referencing, the dialog appears only once PER SESSION. There *COULD* be times a given user would want to see it EVERY TIME Excel detects circular references IN THE SAME SESSION, and there are other times this given user doesn't want to see it EVEN ONE TIME. I'm NOT asking for my preference to be imposed on everyone. Rather, I'd appreciate a configuration setting that would let me decide MY preference for ALL sessions as well as allowing Tushar and anyone else to opt for different behavior. Isn't choice good?
This is akin to compilers providing different warning levels and letting developers decide at which warning level compilation 'fails'.
FWIW, another option I'd like is disabling the file selection dialogs Excel displays when entering formulas with range references containing worksheet qualifiers when the worksheet name doesn't (yet) appear in the workbook. Perhaps I'm more prone to making typos than others, but Excel has wasted a lot of my time forcing me to keep pressing the [Esc] key when I've made typos in Edit > Replace operations on large ranges of formulas.
An Excel wiki would be a very good thing. Let users create shared information for other users and, FTHOI, let everyone vote PUBLICLY on the quality of those contributions.
Pity the old comp.apps.spreadsheets FAQ is no longer maintained.
3 January 2008, 1:11 pmDoug Jenkins:
I came across this helpful little note the other day:
"Because each adjustable shape has a different set of adjustments, the best way to verify the adjustment behavior for a specific shape is to manually create an instance of the shape, make adjustments with the macro recorder turned on, and then examine the recorded code."
From: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb210069.aspx
Excellent advice, except that the macro recorder in 2007 doesn't actually record anything you do with shapes!
3 January 2008, 4:36 pmfzz:
@Doug, leads one to wonder how much longer the macro recorder will be around. At least we've got such high quality, detailed help documentation! Who says wait for Excel 14?
3 January 2008, 4:45 pmStephen Bullen:
There already is an Excel wiki, it just doesn't seem to have been contributed to much, and hasn't gained the critical mass required to make it self-perpetuating:
4 January 2008, 4:47 amhttp://www.excelwiki.com
Dick Kusleika:
I own xlwiki.com although it didn't survive the server move last year. It had about 3 articles on it, which are safely stored away if I ever bring it back. I knew the only way it would get critical mass is if I wrote enough articles to get some google hits. That didn't happen and probably never will.
4 January 2008, 9:22 ampatrickab:
The challenge that David Hale is faced with is how to get a radical new direction of approach accepted within a monolith such as Microsoft. It is a tough job to sell any totally new idea but when there is a belief that all Excel Help content is untouchable copyrighted material there is an enormous initial stumbling block. I know he didn't say that but the issue of copyright rears its head regularly about Help.
The 'community' mentioned by Dick in his article is alive and kicking. However from one point of view, the community is particularly active because the Help system is inadequate. That may sound extreme but in truth one only has to think of SUMPRODUCT() and DATEDIF() to see that there are inadequate explanations. VBA REPLACE is perhaps another example that just doesn't do it for me. I could go on but there's no need here as I believe we're all pushing on an open door. So here's my suggestion:
Microsoft could post the total contents of its Excel Help file in Wikipedia. That does not remove its copyright it just makes the whole thing publicly available in one place. After that it would be open for people to edit and improve. It would of course be moderated in the same way as other Wiki entries. It all comes down to whether Microsoft is ready to start looking to the community for assistance at almost zero cost to themselves. I wonder whether Microsoft are brave enough to take that first step.
However if that is too large a step for Microsoft to take, they could set up their own MS Help Wiki equivalent website. That could then be edited by anyone who believes they have something positive to offer. If it was managed well it could also be a real help to all Excel users - so serving the Excel 'community' well.
7 January 2008, 2:35 pm