Help

On-line Help System

The on-line help system has been developed as a user guide in HTML format. There are several HTML files, as well as GIFs, that make up the user guide. They can be copied or unzipped to any directory that is accessible from your internet browser.

Accessing on-line help from ArcView

To interactively access the on-line help, hold down the Shift key while selecting one of the menu items. This will activate your internet browser and open the associated help file. You can also open the help contents by selecting the 'Help' item from the menu. The first time you access help from an ArcView project file, you will be prompted to provide the path to the directory where the help files are located and the browser you prefer to user, either Netscape or Internet Explorer. This help system prefers Netscape because it can interpret identifiers or anchors in URLs (the part following a # character) fed to it from the extension Avenue code using DDE. Internet Explorer will display the beginning of the associated help document. Only Netscape and Internet Explorer are supported for Windows 95 and NT, and only Netscape is supported for UNIX.Netscape Netscape is able to jump to anchors fed by DDE links from the Avenue code; Internet Explorer will This path will be written to the same table that stores the data types of your evidential themes called 'Data Types of Weights Themes'. If you move your help files at some point, or want to change the browser, you can edit the path in this table to reflect the change. To use Netscape, edit the cell with the browser name to "netscape"; to use Internet Explorer, edit the cell to "iexplore".

You can also get help by holding down the Shift key while clicking controls on many of Arc-WofE's dialogs. A help document has generally been associated with controls that typically have a click function, such as labelled buttons. If information is required about a dialog control that does not appear to have been linked to a help file, Shift-click the 'Close' or 'Cancel' button on the dialog. This will, in most cases, display the general section of the associated help. All of the help documents have screen captures of the dialog boxes. The more complex dialogs have been image mapped in the help document so clicking on the control in the image of the dialog jumps to a short description of the control and the expected user interaction.

To get help on the visualization tools, make the tool for which help is required, active. Then click on the View display area while holding down the Shift key.

Opening the help files in your browser

To view the help files starting from your browser, type in file://<path to the help files>/wofehome.htm in the URL input/display line. Or open the file wofehome.htm using the browser menu options.

MS Word version of User Guide

A version of the user guide is available in MSWord. The file name is wofe-ug.doc.

ArcView On-line Help Topics

Whenever possible, references have been made to Help Topics found in ArcView's on-line help. To use the reference, start ArcView's help. Select the Index option. Type in the help topic listed in this user guide. As you type, the index will be updated in the display so you usually do not have to type very much of the topic.