Documentation Tools for Excel VBA App

[nigelh]

I have a fairly complex Excel application where the current end-user documentation is hopelessly out of date, and needs to be updated. The intention is to host the documentation on a web-site - probably basing it on the same sort of alphabetic indexing common to Microsoft Help pages. The original documentation was written in DreamWeaver 4, but this has proved difficult to maintain and update (mainly because I keep forgetting all of the set-up!).

Can anyone give me suggestions as to any good tools that they have used to do a similar job? I really don't want to have to get into web page design, and the intricacies of HTML: I'm just looking for something simple, so that updating the documentation is not a major production task in its own right. I need to be able to come back time and again, and simply update or add new information (as I would if the documentation was a set of Word documents). The documentation will include text, tables and screen shots, but does not really need any fancy functionality, such as "hot tips" for the screen shots. I am not overly keen on using Word as the basis, but if I have to then I will.

Any thoughts or observations will be gratefully received!

Nigelh

 

[Macropod]

You could put all the documentation into a Word document (your reservations notwithstanding) saved .doc format for accessibility or, even better, do the work in Word and save a copy as a PDF. In either case, your users then have the ability to download the documentation rather than just read it online.

 

[xenou]

Hi,

More thoughts: a GoogleDocs document (word processing document or even a powerpoint version) might be another option (you can share the link with the users).

HTML is actually very easy when you get past the basics. But even without learning any html you can compose html documents with a WYSIWYG editor. I'd probably try SeaMonkey as it's quite popular, or Kompozer (both free). I would probably go HTML but I do the coding by hand so I don't have experience with a wysiwyg editor. There is a list here: Free WYSIWYG HTML Editors for Windows

I've never published a word document but MS is always working at making web versions of all it's office products and Word probably has a publish feature built in (or, as mentioned, a PDF version can easily be put out for online access).

ξ

 

[SydneyGeek]

Take a look at Wordpress.
Easy to set up, plenty of online resources, and you can edit it from any browser.

Denis