Subtitles of the Movie

Another really nice way to get help in Visio is to use what's called the type a question for help text box. And we can see that here. It shows up on the menu bar and sure enough, the text here, the help text tells us type a question for help. And one reason why I recommend my students use this and why I use it myself all the time is that it provides you an opportunity to execute a plain text, or what's called a natural-language search of the Visio help system. So, for instance, if we were asked by our manager to create some sort of analysis, data analysis in Visio and we knew enough about Visio that we probably wanted a pivot diagram but we had no idea how to create one, we can just do a natural-language search. How to create pivot diagram, let's say. And then we press enter to execute the query and we'll see that what happens is it brings up the Visio help application, just like as if you did a Google search and it's given us a top-100 choices broken down one to 25, 26 through 50 and so forth. We see that we have our navigation here; page one, two, three, four, next, just like you would in a search engine on the Internet. And then we see different options. Now, you'll notice that some of these help articles are a demo format and what these are actual Macromedia Flash demonstrations or animations that show you how to create different objects or execute different tasks in Visio. I also want you to notice what's called breadcrumb navigation. You'll notice that underneath each hit, you see also hyper-linked, a path that lead you to this particular article. So, for instance, this demo on pivot diagrams comes from online help, Visio demos. And sure enough, if we want to look at other demos, we can simply click Visio demos. And after a moment's pause, it'll go ahead and fetch that, probably it's going to, sure enough, give us an alphabetized list or it looks like it's not alphabetized, but a list none the less of all of the demos available in Visio help. Now, you should notice that the Visio help application looks and acts a lot like Internet Explorer and that's definitely intentional and you'll notice we have our backward, forward, stop and refresh buttons, as well as our home page. If we decide well, ok, these demos are great but I want to get back to my result set on how to create pivot diagrams, we can simply click the back button to step back to where we were. Now, it looks like in this case, this fourth article is what we want; insert a pivot diagram into any drawing. We'll give that a click and sure enough we'll see a very well written, concise article that ideally gives us the full instructions we need in order to execute that task. Now, you'll notice that at the bottom of every help article there's an opportunity for you to submit feedback to Microsoft.com, depending upon your privacy settings. So if you want to be a good netizen, so to speak, or a good Microsoft customer, you may want to submit this to Microsoft so that the folks who work on their documentation team have some feedback to work with. But of course, that's up to you whether you want to do that. So that's how to use the type a question for help drop-down. In fact, let me close out of this help article and I'll show you now that this records a history of your past searches. That's what this drop-down is. So let's do another search for formatting shapes. And that's all well and good. We have different options here; training options and specific help articles. And then we'll close out of our help application. And now if we come back to our type a question for help list, we can open up this drop-down and go back in time. Now, is that retained across sessions? Let's close out of Visio. Let's actually exit the application and restart it. I'll do a start, run, type Visio and then click OK. If we open our type question for help, you notice that that buffer is purged so it looks like your question history is retained only while you're within the Visio application and that makes sense because over time this list would become quite cluttered, wouldn't it? So, there you go.