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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: TECHNICAL SUPPORT > How to Use Help |
ACCOUNTS contains extensive context-sensitive help. To access it, from the program's main window, use one of several options on the Help menu, including:
•Contents and Index, which opens this Help file, initially on the Index tab, from which you can search by topic titles or keywords. (You can also press F1 to get there.)
•Search by Topic or Keyword, which actually just brings up a messagebox giving you instructions for how to do that, but also has buttons that take you either to the Help file where you can use the Index for searching, or to this How to Use Help help page for further instructions.
•Help on the Main Window, which opens the Help page on that topic. (You can also press Shift+F1 to get there.)
•Several others, which take you to specific commonly needed help pages, like Quick Start, Technical Support Information, Move ACCOUNTS to Another Computer, and Revision History.
Virtually every other window in ACCOUNTS includes a Help button, which takes you to context-sensitive help about how to use that particular window.
Searching in the Help File
Once you are in the Help file, you will see that near the top left, there are four tabs you can select: Contents, Index, Search and Favorites.
•Contents displays a table of contents, which you can drill down into to find topics.
•Index displays a searchable index of all topics, with many topics listed in several different ways to make them easier to find.
•Search allows you to search on any individual words in the entire Help file, and shows you all topics that contain that word.
•Favorites allows you to add the current Help page to a list of your own favorite Help pages, or display a favorite page that you have previous added. (This is rarely used, by most users!)
The Index tab is usually the most useful, for looking up Help topics either when you already know the title (perhaps Software4Nonprofits has told you the title to look for), or to search by keywords that seem sensible to you. Just type the first word or words of that title, or a keyword, into the text field underneath the Index tab, and it will immediately scroll the index to the topics that start with what you have typed.
For instance, to search for information about Reports in the program, start typing in "report" (upper or lower case doesn't matter), and it will scroll to show you all topics that start with "report". If the first one it finds, and highlights, appears to be the one you want, just press Enter to display it. If you want to see one lower down the list, just double-click on it to display it.
If you can't find what you need on the Index tab, try the Search tab, to search on individual words. If that doesn't work, contact Technical Support for assistance.
Links in the Help
Just like on web pages, Help pages often contain hyperlinks to other related Help pages, usually shown in blue and underlined on most systems. Just click a link to go to the Help topic it points to. Also as with web pages, there are Back and Forward buttons at the top left of the Help viewer, to navigate back to previous Help topics you clicked through from etc.