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Super Tooltips

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JensenH has written some about a new entry point for help - Super Tooltips .

In general, we're trying to rethink the idea of help.  I often hear from people that "help isn't helpful" or "I can never find what I need in help."  I've written earlier about how we're trying to address the help search problems - often when we look at so-called "failed searches" (these are searches where the person who initiated the search didn't click on any of the results) we find that the topic we believe they're looking for is present in the results, it just didn't show up in the top five or so results.  We're trying to use user feedback and so-called search authoring (where we finetune results for particular query terms) to improve that.

But we want to look at help as a continuum - from getting a brief description of what a tool or control does (super tooltips) to brief procedural directions (e.g. to help you build a pivot table from a list) to more comprehensive assistance:

  • Short training courses on using pivot tables in Excel
  • A demo video on using pivot tables
  • Sample ready-to-use Excel templates using pivot tables.  "We all stand on the shoulders of giants" and here are some good starting points for building common pivot table reports without starting from scratch.
  • More in-depth articles with samples.  We even have a columnist with some attitude (Crabby Office Lady) who dedicated a column on the topic.

Because we realize that the several hundred million Office users are themselves a great source of information, we also have a community area on Office Online, where you might be able to find additional help for specific questions on pivot tables.  For example, here are posts in the Office community related to the question "how do I sort a pivot table?"

We also are working closely with our Product Support team to coordinate support content with assistance content - sometimes, the right answer to a problem we've identified isn't to write a new product support Knowledge Base (KB) article but to simply update the help content on the web.

And of course, the whole design of the ribbon is really informed by the idea that help is first-and-foremost a user interface design problem.  We're all happier when it's just intuitively obvious how to use a software feature and we don't have to read super tooltips, watch a video or anything else.  The best help is software that just works the way you expect it to.

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  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2006
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