Authoring

The foundation for any good manual is clear and effective step-by-step documentation. This page helps you better understand the tools available to create, maintain, and manage your guides.

Any changes made to a guide, with the exception of tags and the default language, create a new draft of the guide.

The key to creating the best guides possible is to understand all of the elements of the guide page itself. Review the following page to delve into the details:

Parts of a Guide Page

This guide overviews the basic process for creating a new guide.

How to Create a Guide

Guide authoring is split into three separate sections to clearly define the content elements that make up the guide: Introduction, Details, and Guide Steps.

The Guide Introduction is the first tab available when creating and editing a guide. The Introduction is where you add introductory information for the guide, including the guide summary and guide flags. Both better acquaint users with your procedure(s).

• Learn more: Parts of a Guide Page: Guide Introduction

The Details tab is where you can provide essential information about the procedure. Ensure greater success for your users by listing everything they need to know before starting the guide steps, such as required parts and tools, procedure difficulty, and timing information. You can also add Prerequisite Guides to import steps from other guides on your site in this tab.

How to Add Parts and Tools

How to Attach a PDF Document to a Guide

How to Feature a PDF on a Guide

• Learn more: Parts of a Guide: Details

The Guide Steps tab allows you to create unique (specific) steps for any guide. Add images and markers to make your guide as engaging as it is informative. Use explanatory text, bullets, notes, and image markers to make your instructions as clear as possible.

How to Format and Use Bullets

• Learn more: Parts of a Guide: Guide Steps

Once you begin to create many guides on your site, you may need to make adjustments as your site content grows.

The first step in creating a new guide is organizing the guide within a category. Once your guide has been created, you can change the category in which your guide is organized. The Introduction tab of the Guide Edit page takes you right to it!

How to Change the Category That a Guide Is Listed In

You can also use the Tags feature to create tags for various guides and display them on other pages of your site using Guide Lists.

The user who creates the guide is automatically assigned as the author for the guide; however, site administrators have the ability to update the author, for any guide on the site, to another user.

How to Change the Author of a Guide

If a guide is no longer in use or no longer needs to exist, site administrators can delete the guide.

How to Delete a Guide

Note: Users with Author privileges are not able to delete a guide unless they are the creator and sole contributor of that guide. However, Authors can add the Request Guide Deletion Flag to alert site administrators that the flagged guide should be deleted.

You can duplicate any existing guide on your site in order to reuse the guide steps or create templates to be used by site authors to create guides.

How to Duplicate a Guide

If you create a guide in the wrong language or duplicate a guide that you want to translate into a new language, use the following guide to learn how to change the Language ID assigned to that guide.

How to Change the Language of a Guide

You can author guides using your smartphone or tablet web browser.

How to Create a Guide Using a Smartphone or Tablet