Embedded Help in Programs

[Jenner]

I'm curious, how does everyone else make the help system for their program?

I've seen:
Help pages written as web pages and fed to either an embedded or external browser window.
Help pages as PDF files that launch in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Help pages written in CHM files for the old Windows help system.
Help pages written in XPS files and opened in an embedded browser.
Then there's the help system built into Visual Studio which is completely different...

My company has been doing the last option on that list for a while now, but I've never been happy with the results and some polls taken for me by our service techs tell me that our customers generally consider our help system pretty worthless.

I'd like to implement some type of context-sensitive help, such as a "?" icon on the application that when clicked, will take you to a help screen according to what form is selected in the MDI tabbed browser system it has.

What is the "standard" right now (i.e. what is Microsoft considering the "best practice" in help for the current line of Windows OS)? What do you and your companies use?

Thanks for any replies.

[Kasracer]

I don't think there is much of a standard now. In fact I feel that everyone is all over the place in regards to help and documentation. I have applications installed onto my machine that have help in chm, html, pdfs, rtf, txt, context-sensitive (like the ?), etc.

Unfortunately the only projects I worked on that included help were either in the form of a short, overview in Word or a web application that had a simplistic help system (really just a help section that had some static content).

The ones I like the best are context-sensitive with some sort of centralized location in case I want to look something different up. For example, if i'm in the settings dialog of a program I shouldn't have to leave to look up what something does. The only problem is I haven't seen any really usable versions of these.

So... that wasn't really helpful... but I'm interested in everyone else's comments.

[Edneeis]

I believe you can create context sensitive help with CHM but the technology feels outdated.
You could do an external website and pass search parameters or something to handle the context part.

I agree with what has been said there doesn't seem to be a standard for help. Worse yet I think its been like this for awhile so users don't even look for help within the application much anymore.

I think the standard for help is Google.

[Jenner]

Yea, I was kinda afraid of that. I know in Vista, Microsoft is pushing the context-sensitive stuff via the blue "?" icons in the application; but I haven't been able to find a straight, up-to-date answer on how to implement such a thing outside of a WPF application (and if WPF controls weren't so primitive or require so much additional XAML programming to get them to do the same thing as default WinForms controls, I'd switch in a heartbeat).

I can't do an external website since most of the time, the machines that my company's software is installed on, are shop-floor boxes and are either not networked or firewalled out to prevent blue-collar employees from web-surfing when they should have been working.

Maybe I should do some sample programs using offline web-pages and see how far I can get. It just doesn't seem like an "elegant" solution to me though.