Good Connections Magazine

G O O D CO N N E C T I O N S | S U M M E R 2 0 1 5 1 0 SOFTWARE TIPS & TRICKS Do you know a handy shortcut or have a useful tip or trick to share? Email it to training@alpineitw.com. H elp files exist and are readily available from the Help menu. It's surprising how many people have commented once they've been made aware of the Help menu on the main toolbar, "Wow, I never even noticed the Help menu was there." So whether you're aware of this helpful tool or not, here are five things you may be interested in knowing that can enhance your productivity. 2 Purpose of Help Documentation The purpose of the Help documentation is to provide you with an explanation for the tools contained within the Alpine software. Each topic should answer questions such as: 1) What does this tool do? 2) Where is the tool located? 3) Why might I need this tool? 4) How does the tool work? and 5) Provide examples to further explain how the tool is used. Although the Help menu documentation chapters are not considered training guides, you can certainly use them to bring designers unfamiliar with Alpine software up to speed. Since the Help menus contain a print option, you can also print topics you find relevant to generate or supplement your training. 1 Help Menu Locations IntelliVIEW, SteelVIEW, HomeBASE, iCommand and iSource all contain Help menus located on the main menu bar. The content of these menus is regularly updated for new and/or improved topic information and the addition of infor ma- tion for existing tools that may not have been available previously. Note: A "What's New" topic is included with each new version of the Help files, which highlights the newly added software features. 3 Locating Topic Information One of the intentions of the Help menus is that the information you're seeking be easy to locate. Once a Help chapter is opened, four tabs appear at the left side of the Help dialog window labeled "Contents," "Index," "Search" and "Favorites." The first three tabs enable you to locate the information you need to find using three different methods. The last tab, "Favorites," enables you to save the searched location of a topic, which can then be saved to a Favorites list in case it's a topic you believe you may want to visit later. 4 Flexibility of the Table of Contents When Searching for Information The Table of Contents (TOC), which is viewed when the "Contents" tab is selected, opens with the individual chapters in a collapsed state. In other words, the box appearing in front of the chapter name contains a plus sign. There are two methods to uncollapse the chapter, which surprisingly yield two different, yet similar results: • Click directly on the box with the plus sign. This turns the image in the box to a minus sign, indicating the chapter is now uncollapsed. It also displays the next level of the TOC folders and/or topic items while continuing to display the Home page. • Instead of clicking the box with the plus sign, click directly on the chapter name. This action expands the chapter list, as described above. In most cases, a topic screen will replace the Home page with the topic dialog. From within this dialog, as instructed by the italicized red text appearing above it, you can click your mouse cursor directly on the items within the image to access the relevant documentation. Five IntelliVIEW Documentation Tips That Can Help Enhance Your Productivity Click for Help 5 Hyperlinked Text within Topics In many of the Help topics, you may find text that appears blue and underlined. This is text that contains a hyperlink containing either a popup image to help identify the subject being described or a link that takes you to another topic location for additional or related information. In either case, to figure out where the hyperlink goes when clicked, hover your mouse cursor over the blue under lined text to produce a popup tip. This tip will indicate the action taken if you click on it. Note: When the underlined text is any color other than blue, this indicates either that it has been clicked and viewed previously or that it is a hyperlink set up to access a different Help menu chapter other than the one you currently have open, as illustrated below.

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