# Help Authoring Tool



## ExcelSoftware (Jun 4, 2003)

QuickHelp MacOSX 1.0
Help Authoring and Deployment Made Easy for Mac OS X

Excel Software announced the availability of QuickHelp for Macintosh.  QuickHelp is a development tool for creating and deploying application help to Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows 95 through XP and virtually all Linux distributions.  QuickHelp is unique in its ability to manage, author and test help topics in a single tabbed window running on your platform of choice, then deploy the help system to virtually any computer.  Simplicity and productivity replace complex html tag editing, cumbersome topic management, time-consuming build and test approaches and different authoring and deployment tools for each platform.  Help information resides in an XML file distributed with a native viewer executable for each platform.

QuickHelp consists of a QuickHelp Builder for authoring help systems and a QuickHelp Viewer for deploying them to end-users.  For the end-user, QuickHelp supports a table of contents, an index with automatic search field, word searches across topics, color highlighted topic text with hypertext links, formatted images and context sensitive help from application menus and dialogs.  From the Contents panel, the user can view, expand or collapse topics.  Use the Index panel to locate topics based on index words.  Forward and backward buttons navigate through recently viewed topics.  

For the developer, QuickHelp provides a highly productive authoring environment that combines the Contents and Index panels with the Edit and General panels for editing the help file.  The Edit panel is used to add, edit, delete or move topics within the Contents tree.  Formatted text, images and links between topics can be quickly added.  Each topic has fields for defining index words and context sensitive identifier strings that link topics to application menus and dialogs.  Topics or portions of a topic can be conditionally visible based on the current platform or other variables.  This makes it easy to customize your help system for different platforms or product builds from a single source.  The General panel has buttons to save, open, close, verify, import or export help topics.  QuickHelp handles administrative activities like maintaining links between topics, reordering topics and locating bad links, missing indexes or images.  

QuickHelp MacOSX at $195 includes the native Builder and Viewer executables for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, a license to freely distribute the QuickHelp Viewer, a printed manual, online help and PDF manual on CD.  Site licensing information, product descriptions and online ordering are available at www.excelsoftware.com. Excel Software has over 15 years of experience in providing tools to thousands of Macintosh, Windows and Linux developers in over 40 countries.

Excel Software 
Ph: (505) 771-3719 
Fax: (505) 771-3718
Web: http://www.excelsoftware.com 
Email: info@excelsoftware.com


----------

