Simon is equipped with many, many help articles that can guide you through the intricacies of Simon. When you first open Simon the first time, and for as long as you allow it to continue, help articles will automatically appear when the different Simon tools are opened. You can, of course, shut this off if you find it annoying. When I am working on Simon, personally, I find these help screens annoying, but I do understand their importances to someone who might not be as well versed in Simon-eze as I am.
You can turn this automatic help off by going into General Store Preferences, clicking on [Help] in the list of choices, and then unchecking the check box at the top of the [Help] page. The next time you open a form, the automatic help will no longer appear. Of course, you will still be able to click on the yellow question mark button which is normally located in the bottom right corner.
You can also click on the yellow question mark button on the button bar located at the top of the main Simon window. This will bring up the Help Index where you can browse the hundreds of help articles located within Simon.
You can use the refine box at the top of the Help Index form to find the help article you might be looking for. Once you find a help article, double click the article in the list, or select the article in the list and then click on the Get Article button.
There is a new aspect of Simon help that was introduced at Version 4. This aspect of help is web-based help. To demonstrate this help, you can open up the Rent Due and Past Due Notice form. Then click on the help button in the bottom, right corner of the form.
Now, if your help is up to date, you will see that there are two new buttons along the right edge of the help article screen.
As you can see in the above image, the Web Help button is enabled. If yours is not available then your help is not up to date. You can update help by going to our web site, Simon revisions page and download and unzip the SimonHelp.exe file. I will be writing new web-based help articles as time goes by so do regularly download and unzip this help file.
How does Simon connect to these web-based help articles? This is done by writing articles to the web that will connect up to the index number of the actual Simon help article within Simon.
As you can see in the image above, there is an index number associated with the rent due notices generator. The index is '34.' Then, after I finish writing an article, give it the 34.html name and post it to our web site, I simply click on the Web Page button, or PDF File button, to connect it up. Now, it is just up to you to keep your help file up to date by downloading and unzipping the SimonHelp.exe file to get the new articles.
In the future, I will be writing more HTML articles and less PDF articles. The reason for this is that the images in the HTML articles seem easier to read and follow. Images added to PDF articles sometime get blurry and the PDF format, when publishing/distilling does not always format correctly. For instance, widow protection (the ability to not have single lines of a paragraph appearing at the bottom of a page) does not work.
Hope this helps!