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Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

Windows help and Windows troubeshooter are among the two most useless things in the OS (and lately it's Cortana). It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things. Same goes for answers.microsoft.com, whenever i see that link on top og Google results I'm pretty sure I'll just waste 10 minutes of my life and then search for the same thing on Stackexchange and pray to god someone has answered there in the succinct SO way. God knows how much resources and man hours Microsoft puts into making these things.

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I remember back in the days of 98 when in my experience, hitting F1 would trigger the help which would never load rapidly or successfully. My standard operating procedure was to do a hard shutdown. It was so frustrating.

I was roughly 5-7 while using it. Maybe it wasn't that bad and I was simply impatient. Regardless, it's always been useless to me.

Office has a zillion features buried in various menus and panels. The help feature has been pretty reliable when I need to find something that I know is in there.

Surely you're kidding right?

I have never once found an answer in an F1 help in a Microsoft product. And I've been using Windows since 3.0.

On a somewhat related note: Before wiki's, google, and stackoverflow became the norm, I used to love downloading CHM (compiled help files) references for HTML 3.x, Javascript, C/C++, and more.

I use Excel rather infrequently but when I do it's for something complicated, I could not do anything in Excel without F1 help. Just Excel.

Way back in the day, the help documentation shipped with MSDOS really helped me out. IIRC it had a colored text-graphical interface that let you look at all the commands and what they could do.

Really helped out a young kid figure out how to write autoexec.bat/config.sys files so that his games could run. Being able to write menus so I could customize my setup for each game was so amazing.

With the advent of the internet the quality of on-system help documentation has stagnated.

'stagnates'. ha. what an euphemism.

My recollection is that help on visual studio and the old SQL server tool used to be excellent until they moved it online.

Then it became uselessly slow.

Yep. I always installed the documentation CD and loved having fast access to API docs. But arguably Google is still faster.

OSX makes these interfaces somewhat usable by providing a keyboard-driven filter for all menu items. Microsoft should copy this feature.

It has, at least in Office. There's a "how to..." search box which accomplishes the same thing (and better, I would say).

I really don't understand how a company as big as Microsoft allows something like answers.microsoft.com to exist.

Despite for some reason having very good SEO, searches that land you there nearly always involve the same pattern. An MVP restates the question. Then they suggest running an irrelevant command, such as "sfc /scannow". Then when it doesn't help they suggest taking the issue somewhere else. It's not hyperbolic to suggest you could replace hundreds of MVPs with a bot and noone would notice.

The lack of moderation means common searches land you on threads - on a Microsoft subdomain - full of nothing but bagging out Microsoft and swearing at the state of things.

I mean I get that for a resources constrained company it can be hard to do better, and I wouldn't fault small businesses. But given this shows up for just about every Google search relating to Microsoft, you'd think there'd be marketing value in fixing it.

I remember Visual C++ 6 where F1 would instantly go to and offline reference to the current symbol, similar to Qt Creator now. It was great.

Of course now it searches done Windows live forum or something and is 100% useless.

AFAIK pressing F1 in Visual Studio takes you to the top Bing result for the text under the cursor within MSDN. This could be the reference you were looking for, a reference for something completely different in a different programming language (a lot of potentially helpful context is not considered) or in extreme cases some other random article or discussion. It's all over the place.

I can't believe that I've used Qt Creator for three years and never knew that.

You can also add cppreference in as a help module: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives#Qt_help_b...

I haven't dared pressing F1 for a long time now but I remember Visual Studio versions where pressing F1 would completely stop your computer because it starts up the "Help Server", lots of 7200 spinning rust churn, more churn, an Electron-style app opens..

That would be VS 2010 and later. Before that, it had an actual working offline help system (which took, IIRC, more than half of those CDs that came in the box). And that help was actually pretty good.

Back in the days of Visual C++ 4.2, F1 would actually help.

Windows, Office, Visual C++ help are all God-awful now. As a few have said, much better just to Google search and lunge for Stack Overflow.

> It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things.

Keep in mind that the Windows help system (and F1 as a shortcut for the same) dates back to when Internet was not a given - heck, TCP was not a given.

Now that I think about it, I actually wonder when F1=help became a thing. I distinctly recall a lot of DOS software already using it - e.g. Norton Commander had help on F1 since v1.0, and that shipped in 1986.

The internet has been a thing for quite some time now, like at least 4 os releases? Microsoft could have found the time to redo the help system to suck less.

It has been redone (whether it sucks less is subjective, of course).

Don't know if you noticed, but a few years ago a ton on the on-box help content in Windows got replaced with fwlinks. I'm pretty sure it was because they realized they were spending a ton of money on shipping and localizing content that people would just ignore in favor of search results. Open notepad and look at Help->View Help for an example.

On a side note, this is extremely uncool for people working on non-internet connected machines. It is doubly annoying when you're using the web interface to interact with a device and click help and it 503s because they didn't bother to ship the manual on the device.

Every year it becomes harder and hard to work on machines that aren't 24/7 connected to the internet. My favorite is when people say "oh, there is this webservice we need you to deploy" and I look and it is written in node.js and has about a billion dependencies, each one of which will require its own waiver and approval.

I've never been helped by nor successfully troubleshot anything with either of those. And I'm baffled why a glorified text document which rarely contains any useful information grinds my beefy gaming computer to a halt.

Those features are not made for us, rather for the majority of clueless users that save files in whatever directory happens to be the default one.

Do they know what F1 is?

They will when they find out what F2 does.

Many keyboards have "Help" written on it.

That's the type of user who would never read the help content even if it was good.

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