help: topic title phrasing (long, sorry!)

Subject: help: topic title phrasing (long, sorry!)
From: Becca Price <rp51 -at- CHRYSLER -dot- COM>
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 1997 19:35:14 -0400

I'm creating a help file for an application that creates standardized
reports from a central
database (among other things!), and I'm going nuts on one issue.
first, some background.
When you enter the ap, you get a 3-tabed "report selection" dialog box
that you use
to specify the contents of the report (the Where tab - where you enter
the criteria like
Vehicle Family = AB, and Date is between June 1, 1997 and June 6, 1997
- that kinda thing),
the sort order of the retrieved rows (the Order By tab) and the page
breaks (the Group By tab).
Once you've retrieved your report, you can also apply an ad-hoc filter,
and resort to get the
report you want to print. Behind the Sort dialog box is a Modify
Expression dialog box that allows
you to convert simple column names as sort criteria into complex sort
criteria expressions.
(this whole thing is written in PowerBuilder, and I understand these
are std. PB functions, if
that helps.)

Here's my problem. The Where Tab section has a topic that discusses
operater precedence -
what order the different "where" statements are processed in. Filter
and Modify Expression also
need precedence topics - but while they treat precedence the same, it's
different from the Where
tab precedence topic... subtly, but different. There are about 5
topics that are common to
Where, Filter, and Modify Expression - but while the *topic* is the
same, the content is *different*
for Where than it is for Filter and Modify Expression.

The word from On High is that I am to use the same topic for Filter and
Modify Expression, to avoid
duplicate information. Which normally I agree with, but it does raise
one difficulty: what do I call
the topics to distinguish similar topics from each other?

My one solution is:

Precedence in the Where Tab
Precedence in the Filter and Modify Expression dialog boxes

That seems awfully long - particularly when the topic title is itself
longer than just "Precedence" - like
"Using AND and Or in the ..."

Can anyone come up with anything more elegant? TIA!

-becca

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