Concrete Ideas on Improving Documentation

I’m the kind of person who can only complain about something for so long, and then I have to DO something. Complaints that don’t lead to action is how I define “whining”.

I’m also the kind of guy who vascillates between naively hopeful and callously cynical. Yesterday I was the latter, today I’m the former.

This is your chance to be part of actually doing something concrete. For a moment, please be naively hopeful with me.

I’m looking for concrete and practical ideas for improving the SolidWorks Help documentation. I want people to make suggestions as comments here on my blog. When SolidWorks corp asks for help like this, no one sees the responses, and I think that’s a problem, so I’m going to ask for help and be very open about what people want – with a couple of exceptions. Angry or emotional rants will be deleted. There are a couple of individual’s names that will get automatically booted by my spam filter. If you’re on that short list, you already know who you are, so don’t bother.

Example of what I’m looking for:

“I think the help would be improved if the Index were more complete, for example, I can’t find the “engage belt” option in the index.”

“I like the little videos that they add, but they need more screen shots that include more of the PropertyManager interface”.

“The Search function returns too much irrelevant data.”

Example of something that will get removed:

“SolidWorks management sux. This product will continue to go nowhere until they port to HP-UX. The documentation should be all video. Anyone who doesn’t understand this is a shill.”

“My name is Jon Banquer or cliff  or any one of their aliases.”

We’ve got limited time to make this work, so if you have an idea, suggestion or comment, I would like to hear it now.