Re: RoboHelp: to upgrade, or stand pat?

[Janet Ring <janet -at- LIVEPICTURE -dot- COM>]

George,

In my experience RoboHelp 5 does not work with MS Word 97, but only with MS
Word 95.
We recently upgraded to RoboHelp 6 and found a major incompatibility with
MS Word 97. Numbered lists will not align correctly, occasionally revert to
the number 1 for all steps, and you have to format each numbered list to
restart at 1 (otherwise, continuous numbering takes over throughout the
document).

The only workaround I found is to format all procedural steps to a style
such as Indented, which is once removed from the Normal text style.
Manually number each procedural step and format the paragraph style as you
wish. Your procedural steps will hold that format. (When I attempted this
using Normal text style, Word reverted to its autonumbering tricks and
problems.)

There are some features in RoboHelp 6 that are convenient and helpful, plus
our company is using Word 97 for all docs, so it was worth it for me to use
the manual numbering fix. However, if you're happy using RoboHelp 5 with
Word 95 you can stay with that.

Good luck. I'm interested in hearing others' experience with this RoboHelp
6 upgrade. Personally, I think the incompatibility should have been fixed
between RoboHelp 6 and Word 97 before RoboHelp 6 was released. We were not
happy that we paid for the upgrade and found such a big problem.

Janet Ring
Senior Technical Writer
Live Picture, Inc.
Campbell, CA
www.livepicture.com

Original message:
>Date:    Mon, 17 Aug 1998 13:21:53 -0600
>From:    "Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)"
>         <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
>Subject: Robohelp: to upgrade, or stand pat?
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>I'll be beginning a new Win95 help project in a week or two, and as
>this will be my first Win95 project, I need some advice from
>experienced RoboHelp users. I wrote my most recent help file for
>Win3.1 (our clients have been slow to upgrade) using Word 6 and
>RoboHelp 4. Since that time, I've been rewarded with a new Win95
>computer and I've installed RoboHelp 5.0 office (because future help
>projects would be Win95-only and we've upgraded to Word97).
>
>As is the case for all new software, there are likely to be all kinds
>of fascinating new bugs in RoboHelp 6.0, and this left me wondering
>about the best choice of tools for my new project: Should I revert
>back to Word 6/RH4, with familiar bugs and workarounds? Should I
>stand pat with Word97/RH5? Should I upgrade to RH6? Given that we
>probably won't release software updates more often than annually,
>would it make any sense to purchase the upgrade program, or is an
>annual bug-fix purchase going to be good enough for my needs?
>
>While we're on the topic, are there any surprises in store for me
>with the newer versions of the software (RH5 and RH6)? I know I don't
>like the new interface much (far too cluttered... I miss the spartan
>interface of RH4), but I can cope with it... what I'm more interested
>in is discovering what sort of old habits I'll have to unlearn and
>what new habits I'll have to learn.
>
>I'll summarize all responses I receive privately for the list, and
>I'll try to include any responses sent only to the list (but may miss
>them).
>--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
>geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
>
>"Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it."--Author unknown

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