Track Changes

[TMSpats2]

Does RoboHelp have a feature that allows you to easily track changes from one version to the next. It certainly would be very useful and save a lot of time when editing the changes for large projects.

Any ideas would be appreciated. It would be nice if you could just turn on a track changes feature like you can in MS Word.

Thanks.

[RoboColum_n_]

RH does not have this feature but you can request it in the next version by submitting a wish list item. No guarantees of course. Others output to Word to use the track changes feature when reviewing documentation. Hope this helps.

[TMSpats2]

Thank you for answering so quickly! However, I am not thrilled with the answer:(

[RoboWizard]

Hi TMSpats2

Unfortunately it does not. However, I will gladly share one way I helped manage this at a former employer.

What we did with the changes was to "track" them within the main body of the topic. Here is how we did it.

Within the topic, at the very top, I inserted a DHTML drop-down. This drop-down contained a simple table. Inside the table, we listed the date, initials of who made the change and what the change actually consisted of. Then we were rigorous with making sure this area was updated each time a change occurred. (As you might imagine, this is crucial). The tabe bit was nice, as when we needed to add to it, we simply made sure our cursor was in the bottom right cell and pressed Tab to create a new row. Then it was just "fill in the blanks". And even some of that was easy to do by copying and pasting from an E-Mail message where the change was requested!

I then simply inserted a small image that was right aligned and linked the DHTML action to the image. The end result was a topic containing a small image in the upper right corner. When the image was clicked, the change log was revealed.

Hopefully this helps... Rick

[TMSpats2]

Thank you for sharing.

What did you do when you deployed the Help? Delete all the tables?

[RoboColum_n_]

I do (more or less) what Rick suggests and I leave the whole audit trail in. Our users find it useful to know what has changed in a topic even if it is only a summary.

[CraigCC]

Hi TMSPATS,

Just FYI, I've used a similar technique to add authors comments on each topic. These comments are just marked with a conditional tag so they get hidden from the shipping build. Guessing you could do the same with the table if you want to hide it from your users.

So many choices, you must be jumpin for joy :-)

Kind Regards
Craig

[TMSpats2]

I am just beside myself, I am so thrilled!

[TMSpats2]

Thank you all for the answers you have provided here. I set up a template using Rick's technique and then set it up as conditional text per Craig. Definitely great ideas. This will suffice until RH provides a tracking feature:) I also added tracking to the Wish List.

Happy Friday!

Thanks,
Mary