HelpStudio Reviews

The combination of HelpStudio with Document X! allows you to combine generated documentation with hand-written html-pages.

I would like to split the documentation into manuals. Each manual should be generated into a separate target directory. However, several manuals should have cross references between and a common table of contents. Helpstudio only allows you to have everything into one giant huge project. With this feature we could move more of our documentation to HelpStudio.

Provide online documentation for the Mimer SQL Data Provider.

Even with the trial version, I was able to build a good looking FAQ for the API we were working on.

Easy to pick on, although a bit more complicated to become an expert.

Could use some HTML-like code to build page templates.

Tutorials were not covering functionalities very well.

I like that it is all html based and online. Easy template based design, so I can change my project around easily

Not insanely well designed site. Other than that it’s great

Helps me to get past my lack of knowledge at times

The software is good at building API documentation. I was using it to document C# projects. Once you grab all the .dll files and the accompanying XML documentation output, it will build the help project from these files. You can see what the developers entered as documentation with the option to overwrite their comments with your own without changing it in code. That said, there will be frustrations as you try to find the one DLL not included in your assemblies folder using the often cryptic error messages.

The most glaring shortcoming of this software is the poor documentation. If you want to customize the output of your deliverables, there is little to no help. Their documentation seems to be focused on videos that are rarely helpful and that do not have a table of contents or other mechanism to scan the content. You end up spending several minutes to confirm the video is only helpful for the most basic of tasks.

Customization of output is very difficult for the reason just mentioned. I was able to extend the functionality of the webhelp projects it creates, but did so only by fumbling around in the dark.