Jan's Windows Basics: Help

Step-by-Step: Search Help - Vista/Win7

What you will learn:

to choose whether or not to include online Help
to use keywords to search Help
to use Find to search on a page
to recognize and use links to hidden text

To work with Help in WinXP, skip to WinXP Help

Start with: Help & Support Center/Help is open.

What to Search

Help in Windows Vista and Windows 7 allows you to choose whether or not to include online Help in the results. Searching online can take longer, of course, but it provides more results and the most recent version of articles that have been updated. The default setting is to include online Help, which comes from Microsoft's web site. 'Offline Help' means the articles which are stored on your computer's hard disk as part of Windows.

If necessary, open the Help and Support Center: Start > Help and Support
Inspect the bottom right corner of the window. Does it show Offline Help or Online Help?
If necessary, click on the Online Help button and then on Get offline Help .
The button in the corner changes to Offline Help.

Alternate method: To change the default, the Options button - Settings... opens the Help Settings dialog. Check the box "Include Windows Online Help and Support when you search for Help" if you want to always include online Help in your searches.

Dialog: Help Settings (Vista)

Search Help with Keywords

Each Vista or Win7 Help window has a search text box at the top.

Click in the Search Help text box at the top of the page.
Type keyboard shortcuts and press the ENTER key or click the magnifying glass at the right end of the box.

The page changes to show a list of articles that match the keywords.

Most useful first: Windows tries to guess which articles you would find the most useful and put them first in the results list. The order appears to be similar to the following-

Article contains the keywords:
- in the title
- somewhere as a phrase
- as separate words instead of as a phrase
- only 1 word from the phrase
Some articles may not contain the words at all but are considered to be related to your keywords. It may not be obvious to you why Windows thinks so!
Change the Offline Help to Online Help, using the button at the bottom right of the window.
The list automatically revises itself to include any online articles that match the keywords. The order of articles in the list may change.

Unlike previous versions of Windows, there is no way to tell which articles are online and which are offline!
Scroll the list to see all of the results. Only the first 30 are showing in Vista. In Win7 there are only 25 results. If there were more, there would be a similar link. Further results are usually not very close to what you were looking for... if you chose your keywords well.
Vista only: At the bottom of the page, click on the link 30 more results for keyboard shortcuts. The page changes to show the next 30 articles. Now we are getting to articles that don't look too promising!
Use the Back button to return to the first page of results.
Change back to using only Offline Help.
Open and inspect a several of the articles in the results list. Are there any that do not seem to belong?

Find On This Page: Right Click

Sometimes your keywords may not be in the title or even the first paragraph of the article. To search on a particular page, you must switch to a different search feature, Find (on this page)

Click on the result, Make the keyboard easier to use.
The window displays a short article. Do you see your keywords on this page?
This one is short enough that you could hunt for yourself, but there is a way to let Windows help you find those keywords.
Right click on the page. A context sensitive menu appears.
Click on Find (on this page) .
The Find dialog appears.
Type in your keywords again, keyboard shortcuts
(It would make sense for the Find dialog to fill in what you were just using Search Help for, but it does not.)
Win7 by default automatically highlights the keywords in the article as you type. The first one in the article has a blue background. The rest have a yellow background. You can scroll the document and see where your keywords appear. If you don't like this, uncheck the box Highlight all matches in the dialog.
Click on the Next button (even though you have not found the first one yet!)
Windows highlights the first "keyboard shortcuts" that it finds.

All or nothing: The Find dialog is not like Search! It looks for the phrase only, not for individual words in the phrase. So if you type in cats and dogs, Find will not find the single word "cats" or "dogs". You would have to repeat your search with single words.

Match whole word only: You can check this box to insist on searching only for your exact keywords. So if you typed in cat, the results would not include cats or category or catastrophe.

Match case: If you checked this box and typed in cat, then the results would not include Cat.
Click on the Next button again.
The next instance of the keywords is highlighted.
This shows that Find does look at ALL of the text on the page, including links to other pages.
Click on the Next button again until you return to the first occurrence. There are not many!
Click on the Close button for the Find dialog.
Click the Back button to return to the results list.

Find On This Page: Options

Another way to pull up the Find dialog is from the Options button on the toolbar.

This time we will look at a longer article that contains our search phrase many times.

Click on result Using your keyboard
The windows displays the new article. Your keywords are not showing in the title or in the first paragraphs of this article. Where are they? It's time to use Find again.
Click on the Options button in the toolbar and then on Find on this page...

The Find dialog appears again. Are the keywords are still there from when you typed them in a moment ago? If not, retype them.
Drag the dialog box to the side so you can see all of the article.
Click the Next button in the Find dialog to see where the keywords are in the article. The first instance is in the menu of bookmarks at the upper right of the article, Using keyboard shortcuts.
Click Next over and over to see all of the places where the keywords appear. Stop when the first instance is highlighted again.
Close the Find dialog.
Click the Back button to return to the results list again.

Show /Hide

Some Help pages include text that does not show when the article is first opened. This is indicated by a topic title with an arrow pointing to the right.

Clicking this kind of link reveals the hidden information. At the top right of such a page there is a link Show all. Clicking that link will reveal ALL of the hidden text on the page. Some pages have just one or two hidden sections. Others have many!

Click on the first link of the search results, Keyboard shortcuts.
A page opens that at first looks like a set of links to articles. But they are not. The little arrow at the left of a link mean that the link will open hidden text on this page.
Click on the link General keyboard shortcuts.
A new section appears on the page! The arrow beside the topic title changes to point down.
Look at the list of common keyboard shortcuts. These are VERY useful to know.

How to read a shortcut: Some shortcuts use more than one key at a time.
For example, CTRL + C means to hold down the CTRL key and press the C key. Then release both keys. This combination will copy whatever is selected on the screen.
Click on the link General keyboard shortcut again. The text is hidden once more.
Click on several different links to have them all open at the same time.
Click on each topic title to hide all the text again.
At the top right of the page, click on the link Show all.
ALL of the hidden sections are revealed at once. The link changes to read Hide all.
Scroll to see how long the page is now!
Click on Hide all to tidy the page up again.
Close the Help window by clicking the Close button .