Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at Help.
As with most major new software products nowadays, there is very limited help actually provided
with Project and the bulk of the help is provided online.
Therefore in order to take advantage of the full Help facilities of Project 2013, you
will need an internet connection.
I do have a live internet connection.
And one of the great advantages of Project 2013 in terms of Help is that access to Help
is provided in a very consistent way.
Generally speaking, in the top right hand corner of any window, you will see a little
question mark and if I hover over the question mark on the start screen window, here you’ll
see that the word Help is shown.
That’s called a screen tip.
And then after Help in brackets it says F1 and that is the keyboard shortcut for Help.
Basically, there are the two standard ways of getting help in Project.
Either click on this question mark or use the keyboard shortcut F1.
If you click on the question mark or use the keyboard shortcut, you open browser based
Help.
Now unfortunately at the time of recording this course there was alignment problems with
this Help Home page.
It won’t actually stop me covering the material on the page but it does look a little bit
strange.
But I think when I explain it to you it won’t really cause you a problem.
The Help home page really contains four main sections.
Up here you have a set of buttons which I’ll talk about in a moment and then a search box
that you can use to search the online Help for a particular feature.
You then have three other sections.
You have a Popular searches section which basically gives you the terms that are the
most popular for people to search on in Help.
I’ll come back to the Search and those popular searches a little bit later on.
The third section is a Getting Started section and that gives links to three main getting
started sections within the Project 2013 Help.
There’s What’s new with Project 2013.
Note that as I hover the mouse over that term, it’s underlined and becomes a live hyperlink.
Then it has Project keyboard shortcuts.
We’re going to be talking about the keyboard shortcuts a little bit later on.
And then it says, Make the switch to Project 2013.
If I click on that one, Make the switch to Project 2013, it gives access to a page within
microsoft.com where you can download a number of relatively short videos that give you some
information which is particularly useful if you’re switching from another version of
Project.
So apart from giving a summary of the new features, it explains things like a tour of
the Ribbon and where all your favorite buttons and menu items are in Project 2013.
So if you’re new to Project or you’ve used an older version and you’d like a different
view on the changes, there are some good videos here for you to download and take a look at.
And when you’ve finished looking at those, then you just close this browser and you’ll
be back to the Project Help home page again.
Now the fourth section on the Project Help home page is also a set of links, Basic tasks
in Project, Change working days for the Project calendar, and so on.
If I followed one of those, say Set a baseline, that takes you through to the relevant page
within the Help system.
If you find that the text is a little bit too small to read, then one of the buttons
in the group up here to the left of the Search box, that one, says Use large text.
If you click on that button, it increases the size of the text and makes it much easier
to read.
You can then decrease it again by clicking on the button and it’s back to its standard
size.
While we’re looking at these buttons, another point to make here is that to the left of
that button there is a Print button which will enable you to print a particular page
or a section of some pages on Help.
Now sometimes when you’re looking at some help, there will be a further link within
the help such as this one here.
As I hover over it, you’ll see that it becomes highlighted, usually with an underline.
Click on that and that will take me through to another page and from there, there may
be further links.
This is browser based so at any stage if I want to go back to the previous page, I use
the Back button amongst the group of buttons in the top left there.
And if I want to go forward again to a page I’ve just left, I can use the Forward button.
And then the middle button in that group at any time if I want to go home back to Help
Home, I just click on the picture of the home there and that takes me back to the Help home
page.
And then just one other thing on this page and that’s the Search box itself.
I mentioned the popular searches before but in fact you can search on pretty much any
term that you might have a question or an issue about in relation to Project 2013.
Click in the Search box and type in a term.
So for instance, if I wanted to find out about leveling type it in and then the magnifying
glass on the right is the button, the command button that says Search online Help, click
on that.
Now the links that I can see here are a bit of a mix really.
Some of them just help me to find things say on the Ribbon, but others actually link through
to articles.
The very first link there is to an article, Level resource assignment.
So if I click on that it’ll take me through to an article that tells me quite a lot about
how to level the resources on a project.
If you’ve got no idea what leveling is, you will find out what it is a little bit
later on in the course.
And again, I can follow through links and at any time I can jump back to the home page
and get some more help.
When you’ve finished using Help, you can either minimize it down on to your task bar
if you anticipate using it again or if you look at the top right hand corner of the window
there, there is an X for the Close button.
I mentioned before that if you don’t have a live internet connection, then you won’t
be able to get online help.
If you don’t have an internet connection and you click on Help, you get the offline
help.
Let me just show you what you get with offline help.
I’ll click on the question mark there again.
I get a can’t connect message here.
We’re having trouble connecting to office.com in my case.
You may or may not get that message.
You may or may not be asked to try again.
I’m not going to try again because I want to show you what happens with offline help.
And basically with offline help, all you get is help about where things are on the Ribbon.
So if I type in here Leveling and then ask for help on leveling, what I get is information
about leveling commands and where they appear on the Ribbon, and that’s just about the
extent of offline help.
So it’s not really going to be able to help you very much.
But in summary if you need the full help that comes with Project 2013, you’re going to
need a live internet connection.
The last thing I’d like to talk to you about in relation to Help now is what’s called
contextual help.
I’ve actually leapt into Project 2013 here just for a moment and I’ve opened one of
the dialogs.
It doesn’t really matter what this dialog is about, what it does.
You’ll find out about it later on.
But you’ll quite often see in some of the dialogs that we come across a Help button
and in theory what happens if it’s got a Help button like this in a dialog is it will
take you into the same Help system that we’ve just seen but it will take you to a particular
topic related to this dialog.
So if we were formatting bar styles for a Gantt Chart in Project 2013 and clicked on
Help, we would normally expect to get into the Help system with some help about bar styles.
Now in my experience of Project 2013 so far, a lot of the time when you click these Help
buttons all it does is take you to the Help home page.
So if I click Help here, it actually just takes me to the regular home page and of course
I can then do a search.
I could search in there for bar styles and get some help.
So in theory, there is what we call contextual help, which is help that directly relates
to the context in which we asked for the help.
In practice, I’m not sure at this stage with Project 2013 that much of the contextual
help is actually very contextual.
But having said that, if you get into the Help system, you can search for the particular
topic you want help for and if there is help on it, you will be able to find it.
So that’s almost it on Help.
Let me just close this down again.
For the benefit of those of you who are using touch, of course wherever I’ve clicked for
these things, you tap.
So if I tap on that Help button in that dialog, it does exactly the same thing.
That’s it on Help in Project 2013.
I’ll see you in the next section.