Since the creation of Microsoft’s WinHelp over ten years ago, user assistance professionals have increasingly relied on authoring tools to assist us in our daily work. Today, with our more diversified documentation set, the number of tools we regularly use has become quite sizeable. Which tools do most of us find useful? Which tools provide us with the most satisfaction? Our survey polled the usage of twenty-two tools to help guide us in planning our future tool acquisitions.

The figure below shows the percentage of respondents indicating their use of a particular tool. Microsoft Word leads the pack with 85% of us currently employing it. This tool acts as the centerpoint for development of our content as well as being a host for WinHelp topic authoring. Being a core component of Microsoft’s Office suite helps put it in the hands of the majority of corporate workers. Notepad continues to be popular as a quick, easy, and free text file editor.

RoboHELP Office is used by almost two-thirds of the respondents and RoboHELP for HTML Help has a very high representation as well. Seventy-one percent of the survey respondents used at least one of the product versions; 43% indicated using both. These are the only Windows Help-specific tools to make the top ten.

FrameMaker is very popular (57%) because of its robust capabilities for large-scale documentation development. That market niche has thinned over the past few years leaving Adobe with few competitors. Paint Shop Pro has many competitors in the low-end graphics market, but its free trial version program, aggressive pricing, and ease of use have put it in the hands of 59% of us.

Web-specific authoring tools have a strong presence. FrontPage is used by 39% of the respondents and Dreamweaver by 34%. The 32% support for WebHelp is due to the wave of support for browser-based Help development.

Rounding out the top ten most used tools is Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop. This free utility provides the basic support for HTML Help authoring. Hopefully it will continue to be improved with Help 2.0.

A whopping 86% of the respondents indicated that they currently use five or more of the tools. The average number of tools in use per person is 7.8. It seems that most of us are going to try whatever is out there in an attempt to make our development more streamlined and effective.

Product Satisfaction

The survey asked respondents to rate their level of satisfaction with the products they use.

FrameMaker from Adobe scored at the top of the list with 70% of respondents indicating they enjoyed "Extremely High" or "High" satisfaction with the product (see the figure below).

Of the top ten products on the tool satisfaction list, seven were also on the most-used list. The three additional products that were in the top ten in satisfaction ratings are HomeSite (62%), PhotoShop (57%), and ForeHelp (32%).