You may have better luck in the forums, either the Yahoo HATT listserv or the RoboHelp forums on Google Groups or Adobe. But your first question seems like is more about technical writing than RoboHelp (if I’m understanding it correctly). What should go into a help file? I recommend including the tasks that the user wants to perform. You can also include the definitions and perhaps system behavior, but the definitions can go in the glossary section, and the system behavior might best be relegated in a more remote folder. The tasks should be the main focus of any help file.

Your second question, about working in Word to redesign the style of the help files, particularly redesigning tables, I’m not sure. What advantages are there to working in Word rather than the RoboHelp WYSIWYG editor? I’m not familiar with the 2000 classic version, so I can’t really help you there. But I would recommend styling things in RoboHelp rather than another application. I know tables don’t copy and paste well in RoboHelp 5, so I can’t see how functionality would be any better in an earlier version. You basically can’t copy and paste tables from Word to RoboHelp HTML at all.

Good luck. Sorry for the late response.

I’m familiar with RoboHelp 2000 Classic, and have a few questions:

1. Would there be writing guidelines for on-line help out there? I’m currently reviewing the content on a bunch of help files written in that were created by my client. I need to know what should go into a user guide as opposed to put a mix of instructions, a lot of definitions, and system behaviour in a huge cartographic mapping application.

2. I need know if it’s possible to work in MS Word to redesign the style of those help files done for ForeHelp, create tables to be used in menu command definitions, then convert the files into RoboHelp without losing the table design.

Thank you so much, I appreciate it in advance!!!

Carole
Senior Technical Writer Consultant