Help favorites vs. Web newcomers

Since the creation of WinHelp over ten years ago, we have increasingly relied on authoring tools to help us construct our user assistance components. Our survey polled the usage of 22 tools and utilities and solicited write-in candidates as well. We looked at Web authoring products in addition to the traditional Help tools.

The figure below shows the percent of respondents indicating the use of each product. So, for example, 93% of the 1,300 respondents use Word and 45% use PhotoShop. Word is probably the center for development of most of our content as well as being a host for WinHelp topic authoring. Notepad continues to be used for editing WinHelp project files as well as for Web-based file formats.

RoboHELP HTML Edition and RoboHELP Office are significantly ahead of other Windows Help authoring tools with 68% and 48%, respectively. Of the respondents, 71% used at least one of the product versions and 43% used both.

Web authoring tools have become popular tools, possibly at the expense of traditional Help authoring tools. FrontPage is used by over half of the respondents and a quarter use Dreamweaver and HomeSite.

Other findings of note

Paint Shop Pro is used by two-thirds of the respondents. Help & Manual received a lot of write-in support. The results for other tools are: Director (10%), HDK (5%), HyperHelp (4%), Help & Manual (2%), and QuickHelp (2%).

From the responses to the Tool usage question we also were able to determine the respondent's satisfaction. The award for "Best Tool I've Ever Used" goes to Allaire's HomeSite. An impressive 40% of the respondents granted it that distinction. Runners up were FrameMaker (34%), PhotoShop (29%), ForeHelp (28%) and Paint Shop Pro (27%). Congratulations to these tool vendors!