As a developer I know that the one thing that I dislike the most about a software project is having to write the documentation, manuals and user help files. It's not an easy task to write the help and manuals that your end users expect with their software.

Well, I just wanted to share with you the one and only tool that I use for putting documentation together ... Fast–Help. This one program will do just about everything. You write the documentation once and then you can export it in many different formats that most end users are familiar with such as HtmlHelp (.chm), WinHelp (.hlp), PDF's, PocketPC Help, wxWidgets Help and more (check out the online help to see a sample). It can import Office documents easily, handles bookmarks/anchors, keywords are made simple and the list goes on. On the home page there is a 1 minute challenge where you have to create a PDF document in under 1 minute....1 minute (it's not a typo!!).

There's a whole bunch of features that come standard (some you have to pay extra for with other similar programs). Fast-Help also has support for multi-lingual help files too (I haven't needed to use this feature yet).

There is another aspect of Fast-Help that is truly great and it's not even mentioned on their web site and that's the fantastic online service. If you're looking for a program to assist you in writing your user documentation then I highly recommend that you trial Fast-Help and see for yourself. Nothing that I've seen to date comes close to the features included and the price is a lot less than you would expect to pay too. Go on!! What are you waiting for??

Until next time...