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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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