ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Help page

The Help page

Unlike the pages on the left side of the ribbon bar, you can access the Help page without having to open an experiment first.

Overview

ANY-maze includes well over 1000 help topics, covering all aspects of the system. You can find information either by searching, or by navigating a table of contents. Individual topics, or entire sections of the help, can be printed and topics can easily be copied to the Windows clipboard, saved to files or e-mailed to other people.

Accessing ANY-maze help

There are a number of ways of accessing help in the ANY-maze software. You can simply change to the Help page, by clicking the Help tab at the right-hand end of the ribbon bar, or you can click the button near the right-hand end of ANY-maze's title bar, which will open a separate pop-out help window. Many parts of ANY-maze also include Help buttons or links which take you directly to relevant topics.

Getting help on whatever you're doing now

A common reason for wanting help is, of course, because you're stuck - for example, you're looking at a window which contains options you don't understand. Because the ANY-maze help is context-sensitive by default, getting help in these situations is as simple as switching to the Help page - the help will display a topic relevant to whatever it is you are doing.

For example, if you're creating a protocol and you've just added a new Zone, then switching to the Help page will show the 'An introduction to zones' help topic - this provides advice on how to divide your apparatus into zones, as well as describing the exact steps you need to perform to do this.

Once you've read the help topic, you can quickly return to whatever you were doing using the Back button in the ribbon bar.

Searching help

Searching ANY-maze help is straightforward but powerful. The system responds both to simple word searches such as 'Zone', as well as to questions like 'How do I create a zone?'.

Search results are ranked, with the topic ANY-maze thinks is most likely to answer your question shown first. The results will include brief abstracts of the topics, making it easier for you to quickly identify those you want to read. The Searching ANY-maze help topic will give you more information on searching the help, including some hints to help you find the information you need.

Browsing the help contents

The ANY-maze help is divided into a number of different 'books', and each of these has its own button in the ribbon bar:

Selecting one of these books will cause the first page of that book to open, and the contents of the book to be shown on the left-hand side of the page. To navigate within the contents, simply click the name of the topic - the topic will be shown in the main area of the help page and, if the topic includes any sub-topics, these will be shown in the contents below the selected topic. Note that if you follow a link from one help topic to another, and the new help topic is in a different book, then the new book will become selected in the ribbon bar and the list of contents on the left-hand side will change to reflect the contents of the new book. If at any point you want to go back to the previous topic, you can just use the Previous topic button to go to the last help topic you were looking at; alternatively the Back can be used, but this works across the whole system and not just the help, so if the last thing you were looking at was a different page, then the Back button would take you to that page.

Both the Previous topic and Back buttons work within a topic as well as between topics, so if you follow a link that takes you to a different position within the same topic, then these buttons will return you to the original position in the topic.

Selecting the Help contents button will take you to a main 'contents' page for the entire help system, allowing you to choose one of the books from a list.

Printing help topics

To print a help topic, simply click the Print button. This will display a message asking if you'd like to print just the current topic, or its sub-topics too. For example, if you're reading a topic about how to set up a piece of apparatus in a protocol, then there will be sub-topics which describe additional information such as how to draw the apparatus map. If you're printing the topic because you want to sit down quietly and read it, then it would make sense to print these sub-topics too.

In fact if you print the 'root' page of any of the ANY-maze books, then printing the topic and its sub-topics will print the entire book. This is a great way to create a printed manual for ANY-maze - although be warned, some of the books (particularly the ANY-maze reference) - contain a lot of pages!

Copying, saving and e-mailing help topics

You can copy a topic, or a selection from a topic, to the Windows clipboard simply by clicking the Copy button. (To select only a portion of a topic, you need to move the mouse cursor to the left-hand margin of the topic, then you can drag up and down to select the lines of text adjacent to the cursor). Copied topics can be pasted directly into Microsoft Word, or other major word processing programs, without losing any of their formatting.

Likewise, you can save a topic to a file by clicking the Save button. Topics can be saved as RTF, HTML, plain text or web archive files - see the Saving documents topic for more details.

If you want to e-mail a help topic to a colleague then you can do so by simply clicking the Send as e-mail button - the Send e-mail window will open, where you can enter the recipient's e-mail address and add a message to go with the topic. See Sending documents by e-mail for more details.

Toggling whether help is context-sensitive

By default, the Help page is context-sensitive - that is, wherever you are in the ANY-maze software, if you select the Help page then the help will open on the relevant help topic for that part of the software. If you wish, you can turn this off by un-checking the Synchronise topic with current context box at the right-hand end of the ribbon bar. This will mean that whichever topic you select on the Help page will still be selected when you return to the Help page, regardless of what you've done in the meantime.

Showing Help in a separate window

It's all very well being able to switch to the Help page to show the help on whatever you're currently doing, but this can be inconvenient - for example if you're running through a series of steps and want to look at the help for each of those steps as you do so. You'd have to repeatedly switch to the Help page, read the help, and switch back to the previous page to perform each step.

To make this easier, you can open the Help in a separate 'pop-out' window if you need to. This window can then be moved around the screen to a convenient location, and you can use one of the other ANY-maze pages while still being able to see the help - without having to repeatedly change between the two.

You can open the 'pop-out' help window in one of the following ways:

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Using the button in the ANY-maze title bar

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From the Help page itself, using the Pop out button in the Window section of the ribbon bar

For more details, see The pop-out help window.

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ANY-maze help topic T0981