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I'm writing online help for an application that will be used only within our
organization. This is the only help there is (no printed user manual or
anything). It's accessible from anywhere within the app by a link or
pressing F1, and will be displayed in a fixed-width browser window. The
width of the content frame in the Help is probably about 2/3 of the fixed
width of the application window.
What I'm not sure about is how best/whether to use screenshots. My first
thought was not to bother, because the help is going to be mostly accessed
from within the application. But now it's released and people are confused,
and the Project Manager wants to send a link directly to the Help to the
entire company, in lieu of training. So now we want screenshots because it
needs to stand alone too.
Most screens are a list of items (they collapse to one summary line, or
expand to show a lot more detail) that are almost full-screen width;
therefore, they're wider than the Help window. I don't want to cause
horizontal scrolling. Should I take screenshots of the entire width of an
item listing and shrink them to fit, making the text almost illegible but
giving a general idea of the layout? Or should I take screenshots of
sections that are less than full width but can be used full-size? The detail
view doesn't divide really cleanly but it's possible.
Any thoughts, suggestions, advice would be most appreciated....
Thanks,
Rosemary
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