FrontPage 2000 Tutorials - Where is best place to get some Help for FrontPage?
by Tina Clarke
Help! I need some.
What's the best place to ask for help?
Before asking your FrontPage question in a list, group, club, or Forum etc. Think about using the Help menu. It is at the far right end of the menus, and from it you can search through an index of all the on-disk help you can also press F1 to access it.
Microsoft also have a knowledge base of articles about FrontPage (all versions)
you should also upgrade your help files.
Office XP Update: Additional Help Files
For just FrontPage:
FrontPage 2002 Update: Additional Help Files
This downloadable file contains the most current Microsoft Office XP Help files and replaces the existing Help files available in Office XP.
If you are using a screen reader that doesn't work with expandable links in Microsoft Office XP online Help, you can download alternative Help with pre- expanded content Office XP Add-in:
Plus
Microsoft Document Imaging 2002 and Office XP Small Business Edition: Expanded Help File
If you are using a screen reader that doesn't work with expandable links in the Microsoft Document Imaging, Microsoft Office XP Small Business, and/or Microsoft SharePoint Team Services online Help, you can download alternative Help with pre- expanded content. If you aren't sure what a specific command or button does, or if you want to know more about an option in a dialog box, you can get help through ScreenTips. ScreenTips show information about different elements on the screen. To get help about a specific command or button, click 'What's This?' on the Help menu, and then click the element you want information about.
To get help about a dialog box option, click the question mark in the upper right corner of the dialog box, and then click the option.
Copy examples from Help:
If you see an element in a Microsoft FrontPage Help topic that you'd like to include on one of your Web pages. For example a form field or a hover button, you can copy that element from Help and paste it into a page in Page view. You can then customise the Help example with your own text, pictures, labels, etc.
In the Help topic window, select the element that you want to copy, right-click, and then click Copy on the pop up dialog box.
Note If the element you want to copy is a non- text element, for example a table, you may need to begin and end the selection at the text just before and after the element that you want to copy.
In Page view, open the page to which you want to copy the element from Help. Position the insertion point where you want to insert the element, right- click, and then click 'Paste' on the pop up dialog box.
What if you want to find more help about FrontPage from a third party?
There are also a number of sites that provide online tutorials
http://tutorials.beginners.co.uk/
http://www.trainingtools.com/
more are listed here.
http://accessfp.net/freefrontpagestuff.htm
There are expert sites staffed with volunteers where you can ask a FrontPage question for free.
AllExperts
You can find a listing of forums, Newsletters, Tip lists, E- Lists, Forums, Discussion forums, Chats, Bulletin Boards, Clubs, Specialist lists and Magazines, all about FrontPage at:
http://accessfp.net/fplists.htm
How can you help other people visiting your site with information, explanations and on the spot help? When writing your html pages and you find the need to explain an uncommon or technical word, you might like to use the title tag which works like the alt tag on pictures and pops up with your explanation inside.
For example
<A title="What You See Is What You Get">WYSIWYG</a>
Paste the above code in your html view in the body section, go to preview and mouseover 'WYSIWYG' and you will see a pop up with the text 'What You See Is What You Get' inside.
You can find more about the title tag at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-title
The above coding is done with html but you can do something similar with JavaScript, however please note that not everyone has JavaScript enabled in one's browser.
Visit http://www.bosrup.com/web/overlib/ for some neat JavaScript pop up solutions.
PrepHelp - For Tool Administrators
PrepHelp is a tool administrators can use to pre-build indices for all Office 2000 Help files. Use this tool when running Office 2000 from a Windows® Terminal Server, or when using the Run From Source option to run from an admin installation on a network share.
The first time you use a Microsoft Office HTML Help file (*.chm) that contains references to another Help file, an index file (*.chw) is created in the folder that contains the Help file. Without the index file, some Help topics will not be available. Use the PrepHelp tool to build the Office 2000 Help index files before running Help in the case where a user doesn't have permission to create files in the folder where the Help file is located.
Note To run the downloaded file and install the PrepHelp tool, you must be using Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 or later and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 or later, and you must be logged in as administrator or as a user in the administrators group.
Remember there is usually a solution out there; it's just a matter of knowing where to look and who to ask.
First Published in
ABC ~ All 'Bout Computers
Volume 4, September 2001
