What’s This? Help

What’s This? Help provides assistance for specific fields and controls in a dialog box.

Users click the question mark What's This? Help question mark in the upper-right corner of a dialog, and then click a particular field or control. Help about the specific component appears in a text-only popup window.

This kind of Help looks very much like tool tips that appear when users pause the mouse over toolbar buttons and other components. Examples of What’s This? Help can be found throughout many Microsoft Windows applications.

Note: In some applications, developers program Help so users can right-click the field or control to view What’s This? Help.

How is What’s This? Help created?

In RoboHELP, you create What’s This? Help by creating text-only topics.

When you install RoboHELP, What's This? Help Composer is copied on your system. You can also use this program to create What's This? Help for your project.

In HTML Help, What’s This? Help is text-only — formatted text, links, and graphics are not supported. The content that you author for these topics is intended to explain how to use each field or control at a particular dialog. Multiple topics are saved in text-only files (.TXT).

What’s This? Help requires the creation of more topics than window-level Help, but the topic content is brief. Since they do not support formatting, it takes less time to create them. You also do not need to design a custom window because the popup window that is used to display the information is automatically available in the system.