How many authors start counting with zero (0)?  *laughing at myself*

 

Two things about that:

 

1.     I'm a software developer.  So it is kind of natural for me to do such a thing.

 

2.     The number zero hints that we haven't quite arrived at step 1 yet.

 

And indeed, step 0 is a preparatory step.

 

After deciding to adopt Dr.Explain as my Help-Authoring tool of choice, I organized and wrote most of the help content for my project in a "thought organizing tool" that I have (basically a fancy outlining tool).  It is here that I could examine, read and re-read the sequence of the entire help file beforehand and know (or at least think) that I was getting all the important content organized right up front.

 

I did this in order to avoid having to reorganize the content once it was in the help authoring tool.  For me, the desire to do this is a result of the unpleasant experience of creating help using Microsoft HTML Help Workshop in the past.  If you discover you need to reorganize your help content after it is in the Help Workshop -- good luck!  To be clear, this step (pre-writing help content in a separate place) was not technically necessary, because Dr.Explain makes it really easy to reorganize content.  In fact I find that organizing my help content in advance did not save me a great deal of time, because I could have composed it right in Dr.Explain, and then as I discovered topics that needed more detail, or places I needed to insert new topics, or that I needed to re-sequence a few topics, I could have done this in Dr.Explain very easily.  And indeed I did find the need to do this over a dozen times before my project was completed.

 

 

 

However, doing this pre-organizing step did allow me to start off with a bang, getting most of my document tree structure (with screenshots but minus the content text) laid out in Dr.Explain took less than an hour.  I simply ran the application I was documenting in its various phases and captured screenshots in the structure of my pre-organized help content, not bothering yet to do anything with the callouts or fill in the content yet.  So this is what I started out with (note the table-of-contents tree in the upper left):

 

 

 

 

In retrospect, the next time I have a Help-File project, I will execute this step by making a skeletal outline -- just enough to define my document structure by topic, or at least get close to what I want.  And then with that outline (probably written on a piece of paper or print-out in front of me), I will capture my screen shots, one by one as I have done here (minus content), in the structure of that outline.