Getting Help in Visio 2007 / Using Online Assistance pt. 1
Subtitles of the Movie
Let's begin to plumb the different ways by which we can obtain online help in Visio 2007. Now, you'll note that my use of online and online help has two meanings; one, the formal definition of online help is actually help within the application, regardless of whether we're using the Internet. The second definition of online help means what I referred to in that earlier lesson where we looked at our privacy options and we allow Vision 2007 to go out onto the Internet and gain true online help from Microsoft.com. Now then, the first type of help I'd like to show you is what's called context-sensitive help and we find this most often within dialog boxes. For instance, let's open the tools menu here and come down to trust center where we were a little bit earlier in this module. Now then, let me click privacy options. You'll notice that help manifests itself in a lot of different ways. One way is you can hover your mouse over a particular option in a dialog box, and not all of these have this, only the ones that have the little I icon next to them, but quite a few of the options will show a pop-up help blurb, if you like my technical language, giving us a description of that particular option. Now, another way to get context-sensitive help is to use the help button, which will display in one of two ways in Visio 2007. One way is up here in the title bar next to the close button. And if we give that a click, that'll open up the actual Visio help application and focus specifically on the options in that dialog box. It's quite handy. So we'll close here and we'll close trust center. Let us now open up another representative dialog box. I'll open the tools menu and then select snap and glue. Here we have a dialog box with plenty of options. Unfortunately we don't have the hover or screen tip help available. I'm hovering over these and I'm not seeing any descriptions. And that's too bad, in my personal opinion, because this is quite a complicated box with many different options. However, what we do see now is in the lower left; a help balloon or a help tool bar button that we can click and sure enough, just like before, it brings us up the Visio help application, focused specifically on that dialog box. And in particular, you'll see general tabs so it's giving us tab-specific help. And the way we navigate this is you'll notice these articles are often hyper-linked or they're nested. For instance, under currently active here it shows us snap, glue, dynamic grid and drawing aides and we can expand one or more of these to get additional information. The idea here is that Microsoft doesn't want to overwhelm us with too much information so they'll just show us a compressed list of what's available and then we can simply expand or contract the sections of the article that we want more detail on. So now let's close out of Visio help and close out of snap and glue. So that's the primary method for getting context-sensitive help. Also, I will close by saying that the good old F1 key still works in Visio like you may have expected for the past 15 or 20 years; that is to say F1 has historically been a help trigger in Windows applications, so always leverage good old F1. In fact, let me press that right now. There we go. We'll get more into how the Visio help application works momentarily.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Visio 2007 |
| Author: | Tim Warner |
| SKU: | 33791 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-03-8 |
| Release Date: | 2007-09-06 |
| Duration: | 10 hrs / 152 lessons |
| Captions: | For Online University members only |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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