Why Use RoboDemo Flash Movies in Help Files?

Due to evolving standards for online Help files, Help developers have become more and more innovative over the years. Traditional Help files started off as a series of topics containing text that amounted to step-by-step instructions on how to use various aspects of a software application or accomplish certain tasks. They soon began to feature images, such as screen shots of buttons, dialog boxes, and other controls. Finally, some Help developers started using multimedia files, such as sound files and movies in AVI format. The disadvantage to such movies is their size—AVI files can be quite large. In comparison, Flash movies depicting the same actions are small. Since Flash is ideally suited for display in HTML pages, and HTML Help is the standard HTML-based Help format Microsoft uses for its software, the two make an ideal combination. To bring the two together, you can:

• Use RoboDemo to produce a demo on how to use the Help file itself.
• Use RoboDemo to convert your AVI-format software tutorials to the Flash format for embedding in Help topics.
• Include RoboDemo movies of the more difficult or complicated software techniques available with the application you are documenting.
• Choose from a variety of different ways to insert the RoboDemo movies, thus allowing much room for creativity, which in turn can make a huge difference in motivating software users to actually use the online Help (sometimes a very elusive goal!).