Printed Documentation

The trend is toward online Help and away from printed documentation. As user interfaces improve and become more standardized, the need for printed documentation decreases. It's been years since I have bought a software product from Microsoft with much more than 100 pages of printed documentation. I haven't missed it much. Since printed documentation is fairly expensive and difficult to modify quickly, you might want to follow this trend. Of course, providing printed documentation is a good idea in several cases:

• If your customers need it You might have a product or be in a market that requires printed documentation. Note that beginning users are more likely to miss printed documentation than advanced users.
• If your customers expect it You might have a custom or expensive product, in which case your customers might expect printed documentation.
• If your software needs it Your program might be so complicated that it requires an introduction, tutorial, or other form of help that is significantly better when printed. The more reading the software requires to get the user going, the more the software needs printed documentation. It's more convenient to spend several hours reading a printed manual than reading online Help.
• If your software needs a competitive advantage Printed documentation adds to a product's perceived value. It can be shocking to pay several hundred dollars for a product and receive only a disk or a CD-ROM. A printed manual makes the product seem much more substantial.

Many tools on the market can help you create Help and printed documentation from the same content. You might not want to bother. Although this approach certainly promotes consistency, it scores poorly in helpfulness. Needing help, looking it up in the online Help, not finding the information you need, looking it up in the printed documentation, and finding exactly the same useless information is extremely annoying. What's the point?

TIP

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Having exactly the same help online and in the printed documentation isn't helpful.