Help No I don't mean help me but Help needs Help

[Anonymous]

In the attached screen cap, you can see I've done a list topics for
"constraints". Pretty straight foreword I think.

Rant on:

Notice the first hit is Autodesk Site maps, probably where everyone who
wanted to know about constraints would look first.
Way down the list somewhere is LEARN about constraints among several other
LEARNS ABOUTS and other verbs that have on bearing on the actual search.
Then to top it all off, after finally finding the topic of interest, notice
that the types of constraints does NOT list transitions constraints.
Make a guess which type of constraint I'm interested in LEARNING about!

PLEASE someone at Adesk, set down with a learner and watch him / her
struggle though the help files and observe how impossible it is.

Rant off:

Ray

[Anonymous]

OH, forgot
Anyone want to tell me about transitional constraint? How do I get a part to
follow a surface made up of a plane, a tangent arc and a tangent plane? A
sheet metal piece with a bend that forms a track of sorts.
Ray


"Ray Dyson" wrote in message
news:5418081@discussion.autodesk.com...
In the attached screen cap, you can see I've done a list topics for
"constraints". Pretty straight foreword I think.

Rant on:

Notice the first hit is Autodesk Site maps, probably where everyone who
wanted to know about constraints would look first.
Way down the list somewhere is LEARN about constraints among several other
LEARNS ABOUTS and other verbs that have on bearing on the actual search.
Then to top it all off, after finally finding the topic of interest, notice
that the types of constra
ints does NOT list transitions constraints.
Make a guess which type of constraint I'm interested in LEARNING about!

PLEASE someone at Adesk, set down with a learner and watch him / her
struggle though the help files and observe how impossible it is.

Rant off:

Ray

[Anonymous]

Help=>Search "transitional", select fourth item down

[JDMather]

Can get a bit more involved than this. If you let the cursor hover over the Select 1 or Select 2 it gives you a tooltip letting you know to select the moving part as Select 1.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Ray.

We are actively trying to make Help "better".

I hope that with the release scheduled for spring of '07 that you will see
some improvement.

Oddly enough I used your constraint search example some months ago to point
out problems. 276 hits isn't doing anyone much good.

While we hope you will notice some improvements in the next release, this
"fix help" task is bigger than we could accomplish in one cycle. Many issues
have been building up and compounding over the years and they'll take a
release or two to sort out.

Your continued suggestions are always welcome.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Actually 5th here.

Thanks, I did search for transitional but must have over looked it. Probably
did a sort by title and SET gets pushed near the bottom.
Ray

wrote in message news:5418163@discussion.autodesk.com...
Help=>Search "transitional", select fourth item down

[Anonymous]

Thanks JD, I guess I don't have the patience to wait for tooltips most of
the time especially when the operation Seems Obvious.
Ray


wrote in message news:5418129@discussion.autodesk.com...
Can get a bit more involved than this. If you let the cursor hover over the
Select 1 or Select 2 it gives you a tooltip letting you know to select the
moving part as Select 1.

[Anonymous]

Gary,
Yes I'm aware that you guys are working on help, just got a bit frustrated
this morning when I couldn't find anything on transitional constraint and
spot weld, back to back.
If you didn't pick up on it from my rant, getting rid of the verbs will make
searching a whole lot easier. "Constraint, Learn About" will yield a much
more useful search sort than "Learn About Constraints"
Ray


"Gary R Smith (Autodesk)" wrote in message
news:5418196@discussion.autodesk.com...
Thanks Ray.

We are actively trying to make Help "better".

I hope that with the release scheduled for spring of '07 that you will see
some improvement.

Oddly enough I used your constraint search example some months ago to point
out problems. 276 hits isn't doing anyone much good.

While we hope you will notice some improvements in the next release, this
"fix help" task is bigger than we could accomplish in one cycle. Many issues
have been building up and compounding over the years and they'll take a
release or two to sort out.

Your continued suggestions are always welcome.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

The indexing issue is challenging.

Currently, individual writers must decide how a particular topic should be
indexed and manually make the appropriate entries.

This isn't an optimum methodology but at this time it is what we're doing.

[kstate92]

How about using the same technique Google, et al use to index web pages? The authors of the sections submit them to an automated 'bot that crawls all the help pages to build an index for searches.

[Anonymous]

Google does indeed to a better job of indexing and in fact I wish that our
help would offer a: "Did you mean..." when the search had too many hits or
various other conditions.

We're actively looking at ways to enhance and expand the search engine and I
expect we'll see incremental improvements over future releases.

[kstate92]

Just be sure to port the search improvements in Help over to the Discussion Groups 😉