[6281] in s-news-athena
Re: Use the electronic help facility. [Was Summary: counting reps of x]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Duncan Murdoch)
Fri Jan 27 12:04:11 1995
To: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
From: dmurdoch@mast.QueensU.CA (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 16:03:14 GMT
Cc: wvenable@attunga.stats.adelaide.edu.au(BillVenables)
In article wvenable@attunga.stats.adelaide.edu.au (Bill Venables) writes:
>It is a general problem and the reason seems to be that no-one
>seems to be willing or able to use the online help facility.
>This is a big mystery to me, because it's a very useful gadget.
I agree, the online help is very useful. However, one of the reasons programs
like Excel seem so much easier to use is that their online help is drastically
superior to the help provided in S-Plus. They normally have a large number of
hypertext links between help topics; the X version of the S-Plus help doesn't
support these at all (does it?), and the DOS Windows version makes very little
use of them.
S-Plus help makes a nod in this direction with the "See also" lists, but those
are far too small.
-There should be cross-links to other functions that work on the same kinds of
data, not just other functions that do similar things
-There should be cross-links to each of the topic grouping
keywords in every help topic. For example, the help for factor should tell
you that it's in the Categorical Data group; that way if I know I want to do a
table of the counts of the levels of a factor, I could start with the help for
factor, and find my way to table.
-There should be cross-links to the definitions of all the technical terms
used. Once you learn their meaning within S-Plus, it's not too hard to read
the help, but getting there is a much larger hurdle than it should be.
The next version of S-Plus help should be in html.
Duncan Murdoch
