Using Contextual Help During Instructor-led Training

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Contextual help can be a lifesaver for both you and your coworkers. But before employees start using it, you might have to show them how during training.

Why would you use contextual help?

Article

When you look around your office, you probably see work stations that have reminders––sticky notes, handwritten notes, printed out work instructions. This is how employees remind themselves how to do their jobs.

Insert your docs where your users need them

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"Build it and they will come" is not a documentation strategy.

What is the Launch Pad?

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While the desktop editor is designed primarily for editing articles, the Launch Pad window does allow some basic access to articles in your account, articles you are editing, and recent articles you've looked at in the desktop software. It also allows you to create new articles.

How does ScreenSteps handle image resolution between the editors, web interface, and PDF output?

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This article will attempt to explain how image data is stored and displayed in the ScreenSteps web interface, desktop editor, and PDF output.

In this article you will see the term pixel scale used to define the ratio of pixels in the horizontal or vertical plane of an image that a monitor uses to display 1 pixel. If you want to understand why images in the ScreenSteps system look the way they do in the desktop editor, the web interface, and in PDF then it helps to have a basic understanding of how monitors display image data.

A normal resolution monitor has a 1:1 pixel scale. The monitor displays one pixel from the image as one pixel on the screen. For an image that is 200 pixels wide by 200 pixels high to be displayed at 100% it would be displayed as a 200x200 image on the monitor.

A high resolution monitor such as an Apple computer with a retina display has a pixel scale of 2:1. For every pixel on the screen two horizontal pixels and two vertical pixels are used from the image data being displayed. This results in 4 pixels from the image being used to display 1 pixel on the screen. For an image that is 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels high to be displayed at 100% it would be displayed as a 200x200 image on the monitor. The end result of displaying more image data in a smaller area is a sharper looking image.

Windows computers will have varying pixels scales such as 1:, 1.25:1, 1.5:1, 2:1, etc.

Generating a Log to Troubleshoot Internet Issues

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In order to help troubleshot some issues, the desktop software has a logging feature that creates a detailed log that can be sent to the desktop developers. This article will show you how to use the logging feature if you are asked to do so.

Why documentation matters

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Documentation has to be one of the most boring subjects you can think of. Believe us, we know. We have been trying to get people excited about documentation for a very long time. As you begin to talk about documentation you can literally see people's eyes roll back in their head.

But that is because they haven't created or used great documentation. Great documentation can transform your business.

Bad documentation at best gets ignored and at worst causes your employees, co-workers and customers to shed tears of frustration.

We want to help you create killer documentation.

Troubleshooting: User can't see embedded help tab in Salesforce

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If a user tries to view your ScreenSteps site via a tab in Salesforce and instead of seeing the help content they just see your list of sites it is possible that they are blocking 3rd party cookies in Chrome.

To fix this they can do one of two things:

Add the ScreenSteps Admin Bar to the Zendesk Help Center

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Requirements: You must have "Allow Unsafe HTML" checked in your Help Center so that Zendesk won't strip out the data attributes that are used to generate the admin bar links.

How can I change where page breaks appear in PDF documents?

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While it is not possible to insert page breaks into an article, it is possible to affect where page breaks appear at a higher level. Using Custom CSS you can specify that page breaks should occur after every level 1 heading or that no page breaks should appear between articles when exporting a manual. You can also specify a maximum height for images. If the maximum height is smaller then it is more likely that the text and image can stay together.