Finding Information in Help

The goal of Help for Microsoft Dynamics NAV is to provide information that you can access quickly and efficiently. The Help consists of different types of information that can be accessed in several different ways, as described in the following sections.

Types of Help Information

Business Process Help

The Help contains business process topics that build on a strong foundation of existing information.These business process topics provide the following:

• Context for the process being described.

• Overview information about the process.

• Navigation links to the tasks that support the process.

The goal of the business process topics is to help you gain an understanding of the processes that affect your work, and the various tasks that make up those processes. While these topics cannot capture every company's work model, they attempt to illustrate general concepts around the processes and Microsoft Dynamics NAV best practices.

In addition, the Help contains walkthrough topics. These are end-to-end processes that consist of two or more tasks. By using the CRONUS International Ltd. demonstration database, the walkthrough tasks enable you to learn the steps involved in processes before you perform them using your own data. Application walkthroughs provide the beginning-to-end steps for processes like tracking sales campaign results, or calculating work in process for a job.

For more information, see Business Process Walkthroughs.

Reference Help

Wherever you are working in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you can get context-sensitive Help that describes the part of Microsoft Dynamics NAV that you are working in. For example:

• To get Help for filling in a field, choose the field and press F1.

• To see a description of the current page or window, choose the Help button in the window.

Sometimes, the context-sensitive Help will describe the database table that contains the data that is displayed in the window. The data that you enter in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is stored in tables. The information in a single table can be displayed in various windows. If there is no Help for the active window or page, Help for the underlying table is displayed.

You can also access Help for tables from the table of contents, from the index, or by using Microsoft Dynamics NAV Help Search.

Task Help

Help contains the following types of topics to help you with your common tasks:

• Procedural Help, which gives you step-by-step instructions to complete a task, such as, how to post an invoice or how to set up a customer card.

• Conceptual Help, which gives you background information about an area of functionality in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

You can access conceptual, procedural, and business process Help from the table of contents, from the index, or by using Search. You can also find many of these topics in the See Also section of Help topics.

Accessing Help

There are several ways to access Help information in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

F1 Key

When you press the F1 key, you get Help that pertains to where you have positioned the pointer. For example, if the pointer is in the Name field in the Customer table, you will get information about that specific field and how it relates to the table.

Help Menu

You can locate the Help options on the Application menu .

The Help menu contains the following options.

Help option	Description
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Help	Opens a topic related to the window or page that you are working in.
Page Notes	Opens the OneNote page that has been shared across a company. For more information, see How to: Set up OneNote Integration for a Group of Users.
About This Page	Provides information about all fields and values that are in the table on which a table or report is based. For more information, see How to: View All Table Fields for a Record in the RoleTailored Client.
About Microsoft Dynamics NAV	Displays product information, including the version number of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. For more information, see About.

Help Window

When you open the Help from the Help menu in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Windows client, it is displayed in a window with two panes: the navigation pane on the left side and the topic pane on the right side.

Use the navigation pane to find the information that you need. It contains the Contents, Index, Search, and Favorites tabs.

Tip

You can use the Show/Hide buttons to display or hide the navigation pane.

The topic pane shows the contents of the Help topic.

Help tab	Description
Contents	Contains the table of contents. The table of contents provides an overview of the Help. The Help is divided into books that contain related information.
Index	Contains an alphabetical list of keywords. You can browse the list or type in the word that you are looking for.
Search	Searches for a word or phrase in the Help. If you enter more than one search word, the search function will find all the topics that contain one or more of the words. You can narrow the search by typing quotation marks around the search words, for example "filter pane", to only find topics that contain that particular phrase.
Favorites	When you find a Help topic that you want to use again, you can add it to your list of favorites. While the topic is displayed in the topic pane, choose the Favorites tab, and then choose the Add button. Later, you can select the topic from the list on the Favorites tab, and choose the Display button.

When you open the Help from the Help menu in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web client, you are directed to the Home page for Microsoft Dynamics NAV Help on Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).

See Also

Concepts

Learn About the RoleTailored Design
Working with Microsoft Dynamics NAV