Flagging Help topics as favorites 6

[Mike Lewis]

A VFP developer recently complained to me about the difficulty of finding certain pages in the VFP Help file. There were a number of topics that he frequently needed to consult, but could never remember what to search for, or where to find them in the index tree. Even when he could remember, he still often found it tedious to do so. If only there was some way of bookmarking a Help page, like you can with a web page.

I was amazed that he didn't know about the Help system's Favorites feature.

I'm sure many of you here will already know about this, but for the benefit of those who don't:

1. Navigate to the topic of interest in the usual way.

2. Go to the Favorites tab in the Help viewer. (This is the right-most tab in the panel to the left of the viewer; if it is not visible, click the Show button at the left-hand end of the toolbar.)

3. At the bottom of the panel, you will see the title of the page in question. Click the Add button just below it.

From now on, the topic will be listed in the Favorites tab. Just double-click on it to open it, or hit the Display button.

It would be interesting to know how many of you use this feature, and which pages you have flagged in this way.

Mike


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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[Dan Olsson]

Good tip Mike. I don't think I need it though. I seldom use the help file, and when I do, the search function usually is sufficient

 

[Chris Miller]

I haven't used that feature, but now I put one topic into it that I frequently have to look into: Visual FoxPro System Capacities

There's one other thing that comes to mind when you say "the difficulty of finding certain pages": The original help file index of the VFP9 help was broken, that was a known bug and SP2 solved that, more importantly since Sedna was released the help file is in the hand of the VFP developer community and you get not only a fixed but also an enhanced help file with several topics about legacy commands and functions, for example, from

https://github.com/VFPX/HelpFile

That would also help with the help. Not only that it's a bit extended, some documentation errors also were corrected. And - at least since the help project is on github - the Issues page easily allows reporting further issues or looking into issues others found and the recommended changes.

Chriss

 

[Mike Lewis]

Chris,

I completely agree about the VFPX version of the Help file (also known as the community version). I have been using it for quite a long time now. My main reason for installing it was to help with answering questions here on Tek Tips involving the legacy commands like @/SAY, etc. Even today, there seem to be a lot of developers still using these. It's good that the "community" has carried these help topics over from the FPW 2.x Help.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[Mike Lewis]

For what it's worth, this is the contents of my own Favorites list:

Error messages listed alphabetically
Error messages listed numerically
Table structures
System capacities
Key codes
​

That last one is in fact the Help topic for the INKEY() function, which I very seldom use. But the key codes are the same as those for the Keypress event, which I use frequently refer to.

This demonstrates that you can easily rename the topics that appear in the Favorites tab: just right-click on it and choose Rename. (Of course, this doesn't affect the topic as it appears in the Help file - just the reference in the Favorites list.)

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[Steve Meyerson]

Thank you, Mike. I've stared at the Favorites tab a thousand times, but never used it.

No more.

Steve

 

[TamarGranor]

Thanks, Mike. I guess I knew that was there, but never thought about using it. Just added your first three, which are all topics I visit often.

Tamar