Once upon a time you had printed manuals - generally a User's Guide and a Reference Guide - nicely bound, professionally presented and, I suppose, a pain in the neck to produce (and expensive).

About 12 years ago or so we saw the end of them, and everyone moved on to "electronic" manuals instead. Well, not everyone. Games, I note, are always issued with printed manuals on their first run, only going electronic on their cheaper runs later on (as "platinum" games, or whatever).

Soon after manuals (of professional products, anyway) went electronic, some (!) effort was made to produce an integrated help system - i.e. link the manual to the program. It was primitive: the help system was a separate program that you invoked from your main one, via either a "contents" entry point or a "search" one. One decade later that's still pretty much what we have now.

Having two separate programs means you're inevitably clicking between the two, since both generally want to grab your whole screen, and there's no "context sensitivity" - i.e. the help system having some idea what you want to look up by "asking" your main program what you are up to.

With QuSheet, I decided to produce an integrated context sensitive help system as follows:

Help information is presented in a "panel" (or "pane" in windows terminology) which can be made as large or as small as you like by dragging the bar dividing this panel from the rest main of the program up or down (rather like opening or closing a roller-blind).

The information in this panel depends on what you're doing, first by displaying text relevant to the tab-page you're currently on (QuSheet works on a tab-page system, with tabs within tabs as necessary), second by displaying information relevant to the particular table entry or field that you are editting (viewing or editting in the case of a field, because Windows wont tell me (the programmer) when you are "viewing" a particular entry in a table).

I'm sure it's nothing like as sophisticated as these sort of systems could be, but it has to be a step in the right direction.

Richard