LogicSmith

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Cue Cards 

All Together Now

The cue cards I created for this article were small, most consisting of one or two sentences, and contained no graphics. They were functional but stark. When adding cue cards to a real application, the cue cards should be designed to look more visually pleasing. There are several good books on the subject of on-line documentation in general (and Windows 95 help files in particular) that offer design tips for cue cards and related topics.

Training cards, touted as a new feature in Windows 95 help, allow the help file to send a message back to the originating application as a result of a user action, such as pushing a button or changing to another topic. Unfortunately, Visual Basic doesn't pass arbitrary events to the programmer - it handles some, makes some available as Events, and discards the rest. To trap these training card events, we'll need a custom OCX control, such as SpyWorks, MsgBlast, or foCoach that can forward the message to our code. Having this, we can create a help file that drives the application, allowing us to produce state-of-the-art wizards rather than mere cue cards. This capability, however, will need to be the subject of a separate article.