Use the Mac OS X Online Help


Mac OS X comes with an extensive online help system that offers assistance for both Mac OS X and its included applications. This help system uses an open architecture so other programs can add their own help files. When this is the case, you can use the Mac OS X Help Viewer to get help for these applications.

You can access Mac OS X help by choosing Help | Mac Help from the Finder, or by pressing z-?. If you are working in an application, the same Help menu is always visible, but selecting it gives you access to help for that application, either via the Help Viewer or a special help tool included with the application.

Note

While many third-party software vendors create help files that work with Apple’s Help Viewer, some of the largest companies do not: this is the case for Microsoft, Adobe, and many others. When you want to get help for these applications, you need to use these companies’ proprietary help systems, which work differently than the Mac OS X Help Viewer. I’ll look at a couple of these later in this chapter.

The Mac OS X help system uses an application called Help Viewer (see Figure 22-1). This application works like a web browser, displaying pages with text and links. Just click a link to go to another page.

The main page the Help Viewer displays (shown in Figure 22-1) contains two sections. At the left is a logo with a clickable link to the Apple web site. At the right are several main headings:

  • Browse Mac OS Help This takes you to a section where some basic Mac OS X tasks are explained.

  • What’s New in Panther? This gives you an overview of new features in Mac OS X 10.3 as compared to the previous version, 10.2 or Jaguar.

  • Top Customer Issues This section, and its subsections, focuses on the main questions users have about Mac OS X.

  • New to Mac OS X? If you’re new to Mac OS X, working on your first computer, having just upgraded from Mac OS 9 or switched from Windows, this gives an overview of what Mac OS X is like. For computer novices, there’s a section that tells you the basics of working with a computer. For OS 9 veterans, this shows how to do tasks you did under OS 9 with your new operating system. If, however, you’ve switched from Windows, you’ll see an overview of the Mac and its Desktop so you can feel right at home.

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    Figure 22-1: The Help Viewer application showing the main page for Mac OS X help

When you click any of these links, you’ll find a page with further links to different sections.

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These pages are in two panes, with links at the left (in blue) and information at the right. Click one of these links, and you’ll generally see another page in the right-hand pane with more links that correspond to the category you’ve selected.

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Clicking one of these links takes you to information on carrying out a specific task.

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In this illustration, you can see a help page telling you how to turn off your screen saver. This page includes text explaining how to do this task, and has two clickable links at the bottom. If you click Open Desktop & Screen Saver Preferences For Me, your Mac will do just that. You’ll often see links in the Help Viewer offering to open applications or System Preferences for you. The second link, Tell Me More, performs a search on the keywords of that page. In this case, Help Viewer searches for screen and saver and displays the results of the search. (I’ll tell you more about searching in Help Viewer later.)

The top part of the Help Viewer window is a toolbar with two icons and a search field.

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The two arrow buttons let you move backward and forward through pages you’ve already seen; this works like a web browser’s back and forward buttons. The Home button takes you to the main page for the application whose help you are viewing. If you are viewing Mac OS X help, it takes you to the main Mac OS X help page. If you are viewing help for an application, it takes you to that program’s main help page.

The search field in the Help Viewer toolbar lets you look for keywords in all the help files available through Help Viewer. To search in Help Viewer, do the following:

  1. Click in the field that says Ask a Question.

  2. Enter a question or a couple of keywords.

  3. Click the magnifying glass to access its pop-up menu and select Search Mac Help or Search All Help. (If you are currently in the help file for another application, the first choice will say something different, such as Search iTunes Help.)

  4. Press RETURN or ENTER. Help Viewer searches its help files and displays a list of responses. (See Figure 22-2.)

In Figure 22-2, I entered “how do I check my e-mail” and pressed RETURN. The window that displays in Help Viewer has two parts: at the top is a list of responses, their relevance and their location (showing which application they are about). Click one of these responses and help text displays in the bottom part of the window.

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Figure 22-2: Help Viewer provides answers to questions you enter in its text field.

If you click the Sending and Receiving Email with Mac OS X Mail link in the bottom part of this window, another page displays. This page gives more information, and, in some cases, offers to open an application.

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Note

You can print out any of the help pages by selecting File | Print.

To return to the previous page at any time, and see the results of your search, click the Back button in the Help Viewer toolbar.




How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther
How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther
ISBN: 007225355X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 171

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