Note: This site will be taken down July 1, 2024.

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Help Tools

No more thick user manuals! Help is available right on your screen.

Help may be supplied by topic, keywords, or search, plus interactive tour, tutorial, or demo.

• Contents: Lists topics in groups, like the table of contents for a book.
• Index: Is like the index in the back of a book. You can look up keyword(s) and see what topics contain the word(s).
• Find or Search: Lets you search all the text of the Help file or web site or the current web page. It can find the places that a keyword is used which aren't in the Index
• Tour, tutorial, demo: A walk-through of features and common actions. These are often videos.

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Styles of Help

Classic style Help:  

Two panes. An expandable list of topics is in the left pane. Pick one and the article or list of articles shows on the right. There are often tabs for Contents, Index, and Search or perhaps a Search box that only searches Help topics.

Many programs still use this format for their application help windows, whether those are offline or online.

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Classic Help style: Quicken 2017 - offline; WinZip 19 Knowledge Base - online

Help in web pages:  

Help articles are often web pages that you read in a browser. The pages might be stored offline on your computer or they might be online. You must have a connection to the Internet to read online pages, of course.

  

Help web pages: OneNote 2013 online help; WinZip 19.5 FAQ online

Help for Windows 10 is all online so you will need an Internet connection to do the steps in the next few lessons. If you don't have one at the moment, read through the lessons anyway so you will be prepared when you can connect.

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Windows Search

Windows Search can help you find the Help you need as well as programs, folders, and documents on your computer and web resources, too. It looks only in certain locations by default and provides only a few results to begin with. That's a good thing! You don't want it to waste time looking in useless locations! Nor do you want to dig through a large pile of results if you don't have to.

What Search looks at: Search in Windows 10, like other recent versions of Windows, looks at the start of app names, folder names, file names, or text in a document but also at what comes after a dot, an underscore, a hyphen, or a space. This rule applies to searching from the Taskbar search box and from File Explorer's search box. This behavior is not like other search programs you may be used to, like Google or Bing or Yahoo Search.

Example: If you are searching for 'step', the results could include files and documents like:

• stepedittext.htm (keyword starts the name)
• first_step.xls (follows underscore)
• mydoc.step.pdf (follows a dot)
• first-step.pdf (follows a hyphen)
• first step.txt (follows a space)
• document containing "The first step is easy."
• document containing "Then the stepladder fell."

Results would not include a file like:

• firststep.doc
• ~step4.docx
• a document that contains "That was a misstep."

In all three cases 'step' is not at the start of a word or file name and does not follow a space, underscore, hyphen, or dot.

Not all files! Windows Search looks at the files it has indexed first. It can take a long time to search the content of non-indexed files. Search in a File Explorer window has options for controlling what and where you want to search.

Default results: By default, searching for online items with the Search box on the Taskbar will show results from Bing, Microsoft's own search service. You cannot change to use a different search service. You can choose filters to restrict your results.

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