QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Help As You Work

You're working away and you have no idea what an option or button does. Choosing Help→QuickBooks Help, typing in keywords, and clicking entries seems like too much trouble, so you cross your fungers and hope for the best. But there's no reason to ignore options or bypass buttons with unknown consequences. Most QuickBooks windows and dialog boxes have help features built right in (Figure B-3). For instance, in the Chart of Accounts window, the How Do I? list includes "Add new accounts and subaccounts." You can also type a question in the Ask box, and then click Ask. If the search finds a help topic that sounds interesting, click the link to view it.

In some dialog boxes, you'll see a Help button, which takes you to a Help topic specifically about the features in the dialog box. Some of these topics do help, but others don't. For example, in the Edit Customer dialog box, click Help. The QuickBooks Help window opens the "What's important about the New, Edit Customer window" topic. This topic has some useful information, such as the fact that customer records require only a customer name. Within that topic, if you click the "Address Info tab" link, you can view information about each of the fields. Unfortunately, some of the entries aren't worth either the time it took a tech writer to type it or your time to read it. For example, click Company Name and the "help" you get is nothing more than "If applicable, fill in the customer's company name."

Figure AB-3.  Figure ...