Improvements to assistance features and content in 2007

The following is a post from Marci Billow, the UA manager for Access (and other teams in Office).  The UA team has done a tremendous amount of work in improving help, and wanted to spread the word.

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During the past few years, you shared a number of concerns and suggestions for how we might improve assistance content and features for Microsoft Office Access. Your feedback regarded two primary areas, Help functionality and content organization.

Help functionality

This includes the design of Help features such as search, the Help window, and where assistance content is stored. Common concerns were:

• Search is not effective. 
• Developer content is difficult to access. 
• The best content can be accessed only when your computer is connected to the Internet and, consequently, Microsoft Office Online. 
• Sharing articles with others is too difficult. 
• The Help task pane and window is difficult to manage, especially in combination with the application window. 
• Printer-friendly versions of articles aren’t available.

Content organization

This includes the way that articles complement each other and how information is distributed within and across articles. Common concerns were that reference information about functions, properties, and related programming options and component technologies is difficult to find, and information within specific sets of content is too distributed to be useful. You asked for one-stop shopping for all Access content.

We listened to your feedback and we redesigned Help features and content to address as much of your feedback as possible. In the following sections, you’ll find details about many of the improvements to assistance features and content in the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Searching for content

In the Office 2007 release, you’ll find that search has improved significantly. Full-text search is now available; the search feature indexes and searches every word in an article. This means that searching for an exact phrase or word that you’ve seen in the title or body of an article ensures that the article appears in the list of search results. In addition, search automatically tracks and, through aggregation and analysis, moves articles up in the list of search results when people more frequently select those articles from the search results for a given search keyword. In reviewing the preliminary data, we have seen a significant improvement in the search results, as measured by the number of times people select an article from a list of search results compared to not selecting any articles from those results.

Accessing developer content

Developer and other types of content continue to be distinct sets of content in the Office 2007 release. However, you can now access developer content from any area of the program without opening the Microsoft Visual Basic Editor (VBE).

By maintaining developer and other types of content as distinct sets of content, we ensure that each set of content has the appropriate breadth and depth for each person’s goals. We help ensure, for example, that people don’t incorrectly assume that they must understand VBA to implement a database solution successfully. Combining all of the developer and other types of content into a single set of content could imply otherwise.

For cases where quick and easy access to developer and other types of content is useful, we added a Search menu to the Help window. You can use that menu to access the Developer Reference, Access Help, and other types of Access content from the same place, regardless of the feature that you are currently using.

Use the Search menu to switch to a specific set of content with only two clicks, whether you’re designing a form, using the VBE, or managing a connection to a Microsoft SQL Server database. For example, if you are designing a form, you can browse or search the Developer Reference. If you are using the VBE, you can browse or search Access Help. If you choose to display assistance content from Office Online, instead of your computer, you can additionally search all types of content at once; just click All Access on the Search menu. You can also limit your search to only a specific type of content by clicking the appropriate option on the Search menu.

In Office Access 2007, you can additionally:

• Find reference information for macro actions, functions, and SQL statements in Access Help. Based on data for Office Access 2003 content, we also identified the most frequently used properties, and copied the corresponding articles from the Developer Reference into Access Help. We’ll continue to monitor the data and add more reference articles as necessary. 
• Find content about the VBE, Microsoft Data Access Objects (DAO), Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), Microsoft Access SQL Reference, the Access database engine, and other component technologies directly in the Developer Reference. You can find it by using search or the table of contents.

Accessing content, online versus offline

When we released Office 2003, we committed ourselves to developing and revising articles in response to feedback from you, our customers. We have always solicited and responded to customer feedback, but previously it was on a smaller scale. We were limited to discussion groups, user groups, and other types of smaller-scale forums. In addition, those forums typically emphasized features in Office programs, not specific assistance articles or all of the content about a program.

With the release of Office 2003, our goals were to:

• Expand the feedback scale to include as many customers as possible
• Provide customers with easy and direct ways to tell us specifically what they love and what we can improve
• Respond to customer feedback by publishing new and revised content continuously

Office Online made it possible to achieve these goals.

It provides a repository for assistance content that you can display in the Help window, and you can share your feedback about that content with us directly.

After you click a button indicating whether an article was helpful to you, you can additionally share specific comments about that article.

With a single click and a few optional words, you and millions of other customers now tell us what you like and what you want. To date, we’ve received approximately 86 million ratings and 13 million comments for the Office 2003 content, with additional ratings and comments coming in every day from customers around the world. We know which content is viewed most frequently, which content satisfies customers the most, and what content need to be developed. In response, we review and analyze that information, and then respond to it by publishing new and revised content continuously.

We’ve maintained and extended these goals for the Office 2007 system. For example, Office Access 2007 customers asked for content about Access Data Projects (ADP). In response, we developed an article that explains how to create an ADP, and will develop additional content about ADP if customers indicate that they want more on the subject. We also implemented Help in a way that makes it possible for you to download new and revised content to your computer and use it when you can’t access the Internet and Office Online. We are now defining the plan and schedule for releasing those updates. As soon as the first wave of updates is available you can expect to see them advertised on Office Online, MSDN, and Microsoft Update.

We also added a menu to the Help window that makes it easy to switch between displaying offline content, or content on your computer, and online content, or content on the Web. To switch between offline and online, open the Connection Status menu in the lower-right corner of the Help window, and then click the setting that you want.

You can also temporarily switch to online content by using the Search menu in the Help window. Just click the arrow next to Search , and then click the set of content that you want to browse or search.

As a bonus, the Help window switches automatically to offline content when your computer is not connected to the Internet.

Sharing links to articles

Helping someone else find a specific article is much easier in the Office 2007 release. Every article has a unique identifier that anyone can use to search for and find the article. Here’s how:

• To find the identifier for an article, right-click the article in the Help window, and then click Copy Topic ID on the shortcut menu.
  
  
  
• To search for an article by using the identifier, paste or type the identifier in the Search box, and then press RETURN.

In the list of search results, click the title of the article. If you are connected to Office Online, you can use this procedure to find specific articles in any set of Access content, without first switching to that set of content. For example, if you are viewing Access Help and search for the topic identifier of an article in the Developer Reference, the title of the developer article appears. It’s not necessary to switch to the Developer Reference before you search for the identifier.

Overall, you can now share an article with colleagues easily. Simply send them the identifier for the article that you want to share. Your colleagues can then search for that identifier and view the article. Of course, you can also find the article on Office Online or MSDN and send the URL to your colleagues.

Managing the Help window

In the Office 2007 system, the Help window is a separate application and window that provides one-stop shopping for finding and using content. This means that you can easily do the following with it:

• Minimize it to the Microsoft Windows taskbar and display it again when you need it
• Move and resize it, and have it appear in the same position and at the same size during subsequent Help sessions
• Display it in front of or hide it behind the application window by pressing ALT+TAB, clicking the taskbar button in the Windows taskbar, or by using Windows Task Manager
• Open the window when a dialog box is open by either pressing F1 or clicking the Help ? button in the title bar of the dialog box

In addition, there is a distinct Help window for each Office program, so you can open Help for more than one program at the same time.

Printing articles

Office Online now provides a “printer-friendly” view of each article.

The view excludes distracting, navigational elements of the site.

A link to this view appears in the upper-right corner of every article. Simply click the link to display a version of the article that contains only the content of the article, and then print that version of the article.

Navigating and using Access Help and the Developer Reference

We improved the content in additional ways that aren’t mentioned above. For Access Help, the articles are less “fragmented.” Rather than distribute content across multiple articles, each article has all of the key information in one place whether it be conceptual, procedural, or troubleshooting information. What might have been five distinct articles in Help for Office Access 2003 is likely to be a single article in Help for Office Access 2007.

For the Developer Reference, we considered feedback from Office customers in combination with Visual Studio customers and made these additional improvements:

• Articles use the same design as articles in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Help and other Microsoft development technologies.
  
  
  
• Class library, or object model reference, articles are organized the same way as class library articles in Visual Studio Help; property, method, and event articles are classified under the objects to which they are scoped, rather than in alphabetical categories that don't clearly represent the relationships between objects and their members.
  
  
  
• Class library references include member table articles. These articles provide both a summary of the members of objects in the object model, and links to articles about corresponding members.
  
  
  
• Conceptual articles focus more on specific tasks and goals, or “How do I?” information, as is the case with Visual Studio Help. These articles explain how to accomplish specific goals, scenarios, and customization tasks.
• A conceptual framework is available and makes it easier for both novice and experienced developers to understand Access as a development platform.
• Additional, task-based code samples are available and more code samples will be added in response to customer requests for those samples.
• All content is published continuously to both MSDN and Office Online, and we will improve it continuously in response to your feedback. By publishing new and revised content to Office Online, we ensure that you can access the best and latest content from within the Help window.

Overall, your feedback had a tremendous impact on the design and implementation of the assistance features and content. Thank you for sharing specific concerns and suggestions. You definitely made a difference.

Marci Billow
Content Manager