PTWin User Tips / General Use 
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Help yourself
Making Help work for you
Using
the PTWin Help File
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Tip #: 1.4.22 |
| Ver(s): PTWin32, V2, V1 |
The PTWin Help File is a powerful
resource for finding information that can aid in your use of PTWin. It contains almost
60,000 words spread across nearly 200 topics with over 150 keywords to link it all
together. If you are comfortable using the PTWin Help File, you will in turn be
comfortable using PTWin. To that end we provide some tips on using Help.
Most people simply learn rudimentary navigation and searching functions when it comes to
Help Files but there are a whole host of functions provided by Windows which can aid in
your use of a Help File. The following items assume you are using Windows 95
Hot Spots –
When you place your cursor over text or graphics that changes the cursor from an
arrow to a pointing hand you are on a Hot Spot. A Hot Spot indicates a jump to a related
topic and is the primary method of navigation within Help Files. The PTWin Help File
contains nearly 1,000 Hot Spots.
History –
The Help system keeps track of how you got to your current topic in the file. You can
use the Back button on the Help window button-bar to re-trace your steps or you can see
your steps listed by pulling down the Options menu and selecting Display History Window.
From the History Window you can select any topic you have visited since initiating this
Help session.
Search –
Pressing the Search button on the Help window button-bar displays a notebook with 2
tabs. The Index tab shows the list of Keywords defined for the Help file. Selecting a
Keyword will display the topic pertaining to that keyword. If the selected Keyword applies
to many topics you will be shown a list from which to choose a topic.
The Find tab allows you to build a database that takes each word appearing in the Help
file and lists every topic that contains that word. You can choose from the list to go to
the topic. When building this database you can customize it to include untitled topics,
phrase searching, display of matching phrases as you type, and similarity searches based
on topic categories you define. Each option you select will broaden your searches but
lengthen the response time.
Bookmark –
The Bookmark pull-down menu of the Help window allows you to create a reminder list
of topics you visit frequently so that you might bypass the Hotspot menu structure and
jump directly to the location you have bookmarked.
Annotate –
You can keep personal notes associated with specific topics through the use of the
Annotate command available from the Edit pull-down menu of the Help window. When you
Annotate a topic a small paper-clip icon is placed at the beginning of the text for that
topic. Clicking on the paper-clip will display your Annotations for edit or deletion.
Options –
The Options pull-down menu of the Help window includes settings that determine
whether the Help window will stay on top of other Windows applications, as well as font
size selection and color scheme control.
The items mentioned here are not unique to PTWin’s Help file. They are applicable to
any Windows Help file. Besides the main PTWin Help file we also provide a second Help file
called the Tutility Help file that contains information related to data table maintenance.
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