Help & Manual Reviews

The capacity to swiftly and seamlessly combine document elements and repurpose content is very nice. Help & Manual is an affordable product that is simple for beginners.

Some features are a little challenging to utilize. But when I did more research and used them, they got simpler. But some users may not be comfortable with this.

My work has become considerably more organized thanks to the capability of reusing elements and recomposing a paper. The output formats take just a few clicks, and the results speak for themselves.

Both reliable (crash-proof) and intuitive. I have been working in outline form since college and this program pulls together massive help file and documentation projects with ease. Being able to write it once and use a few compile directives to hid things that are not needed in say a PDF manual make publishing simple and fast.

Reliability is important to me because crashed programs are frustrating. I have never lost work in this product in 15 years. I can't recall locking it up or being stuck either. Confidence follows.

Updates of the enhanced template skins that you customize can be tricky when the skin template is updated by the vendor later. I have a cheat-sheet for what I need to change to tweak those enhanced templates for my custom settings. But this is high-end user stuff and a minor inconvenience.

This is an affordable product that does exactly what it says it will do: create a nice online help packager. If you don't want to deal with XML and other manual markup, you don't have to. Support is very responsive.

It could handle styles better. In the occasional event where I have to paste text into a topic (instead of importing it), there isn't a "Paste as Plain Text" option - you have to paste it and then remove whatever styles it thinks the text has, or you have to paste into a text-only editor to be sure that no incorrect styles are coming over. Also, when you do apply a style, it doesn't work as smoothly as it does in a word processor. I mean, I know it's NOT a word processor, but there are some basic concepts to applying styles to text that don't hold up here.

Make sure you think through everything (and learn everything) before you start: how to give custom IDs to each page (because if you've got 1200 pages, you won't be able to navigate by the automatically assigned page names), how to create an index, etc.

We write our manuals in Word and distribute them as printable PDFs. (I know, Word isn't a great documentation platform but it's the only one I have.) Once the documentation is approved in Word, all I have to do is save it as an RTF and then import it into Help & Manual and boom, online help. (There's still a lot of stuff to do but all of the content and the bulk of the organization comes in automatically.

I've been using H&M for over ten years now. It's a great product that is very easy to use. I like the variety of output formats they support, compiling help files is also quite fast. Working with the tool is generally quite straightforward and efficient.

Their support team is also quite helpful, and I've never evaluated another help authoring tool.

There is hardly anything I don't like. But if I had to pick something, then it would be the lack of customization options for their HTML output. The product does offer some options to customize HTML output and they offer optional premium skins. The skins look a bit outdated however, and I haven't been able to customize the output exactly how I would like it (although it still looks good the way it is).

The fact that we can author a central document, publish it into a windows .CHM file for inclusion with our application and a custom PDF template that we can post on our website.

Some older versions of v7 seemed a bit unstable, but that is fixed in the latest versions and it's been reliable and very useful.

We use it to document a Windows application that also needs online documentation.

People creating documentation must have a right balance between knowing all details and nuances about the product being documented and being able to create good-looking and consistent documentation. Help&Manual allows to have someone from our dev team creating and maintaining personalized and functional documentation in different formats, without the need to outsource this process.

The editor seems not as feature full as single-focused tools, but that's easy explainable because the contents can then be presented in different outputs.

Give the trial version a try, it's fairly easy to quickly surprise yourself with what can be achieved

Creating documentation for software solutions, either for the application user and the partner implementing it is always a painful process.

The ease of use, especially the screen capture feature.

The screen capture becomes awkward when trying menu selections

Please consider Help & Manual if you are developing a help system for your software, or writing a user manual.

From a single project, I can derive a printed manual, the online help for our software and publish a web manual for online use.

The ability to create multiple TOCs allows to easily create manuals for product families...

Not a true WYSIWYG.

Table handling though improved, but still somehow cumbersome, unlike the MS office table handling.

What all the other reviews said -- all true.

In older versions, upgrading took more steps than I would have preferred (not automatically carrying forward old settings), but still, easy and straightforward enough. May have been fixed in later versions.

Documentation of software program.

It is very easy to use, works well for small teams and simplifies updating your online documentation.

Sometimes it is a little bit confusing where to adjust the settings for the desired output.

Look for a CSS-Guru to create your own skin.

Creating an online manual for our software