It's a funny thing about help authoring software - the tools that we use to write the help documentation have generally not evolved at the same pace as the stuff we're documenting. So, as the software that we're explaining gets more and more complicated, we're still stuck with the same tools that require us to map out our topics, figure out what's important, dissect each screenshot, and so on. With complex applications, you end up spending most of your time researching and less time writing.
What if I told you that there's help authoring software that will write help documentation for you? That all you needed to do was to introduce this app to your software interface, and the app would automatically create topics that you could simply flesh out?
Dr. Explain is an automated help authoring tool that produces your choice of output formats - CHM, HTML, online manuals, and even printed documentation. Dr. Explain analyzes the structure of your software's screens and forms and automatically generates numbered annotations for each GUI element - every button, icon, field, menu, and toolbar. As the help author, your job just got a lot easier. All you need to do is add the descriptive text to each annotation to explain each function. Dr. Explain condenses hours of work into just a few minutes!
Dr. Explain will astound you with its flexibility. The output files that are produced by Dr. Explain can easily be invoked by a variety of programming languages such asC, C++, Visual Basic, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF, Delphi & Object Pascal, Clarion, FoxPro, PHP, Perl, HTML, and JavaScript, to name just a few!
Features
The Fine Print
Testimonials
- Save hours off of the task of help authoring by automatically generating topics based on GUI elements.
- Create help documentation in a number of formats - CHM, HTML, online manuals, and printed documentation in PDF and MS Word formats.
- Produce documentation that can be invoked by a huge variety of programming languages.
- Export your documentation to PDF format.
- Import existing CHM, HLP, HTML, XML, TXT and MS Word documents!
- Work with the user interface in 10 languages.
- You can download and install a free trial of this software before purchasing
- Download available for: Windows 7, 8, and 10 (64 bit)
- Buy with BitsDuJour's promotional coupon code and get all this at a discounted price!
- After you purchase Dr. Explain it may be used indefinitely.
- Dr. Explain is licensed per user, so if more people are going to use Dr. Explain you will need to purchase additional copies.
- Upgrades to future versions of the software will be free for minor versions only.
- Support is provided for the lifetime of the product.
- No return policy.
- Prices do not necessarily include taxes, which will vary by country.
- Review what others have to say...
- “Software developers have many skills, but a professional design sense isn't always one of them. Even developers who know good design don't often have much practice with InDesign or similar programs, so any sort of layout project--like creating software documentation--can be tremendously time-consuming. Dr. Explain can help, and this app just received a couple dozen improvements and fixes to bring it up to version 2.6.
Dr. Explain can save you countless hours of copying, pasting, linking, and other design busywork by automatically capturing screens from your software, then generating interactive screenshots complete with callouts and links for all your window controls. All you have to do is flesh it out with some descriptive text to create final help files, whether it's CHM, HTML, or printable docs.”- Paul Hughes, Contributing Editor, CNET Download.com
- “Wow what a great tool, I've used Rob.... for years and got sick of their extortion about 3 years ago. Very impressive piece of software!”- Michael Lawson, Farpoint Solutions / Secure Design Technologies
- “Last night I was working with the trial version of Dr. Explain. I was impressed with this tool. I bought and registered the software.”- Terry Jepson, WISCO Computing
- “Dr.Explain is a help authoring program with a focus on visually describing the Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) of programs. It is an excellent tools for easily creating those "Quick Start" guides that have lots of screenshots of the program and help you learn where everything resides in a program. It is also great for detailed user manuals that document all of the features and options reachable through a program's GUI through highly annotated screenshots. Dr.Explain's well thought-out design and intuitive workflow means even the default configuration produces attractive user-friendly interactive documentation with a minimal amount of fuss.”- Chaim Krause, Editorial Review, DonationCoder.com
- “Dr. Explain is, without question, an awesome piece of software.
The guys behind Dr. Explain have created a simple and powerful problem solver. The problem, of course, is how to quickly create Help Documentation. Their solution is the best I've seen.
So go get it, try it out. You'll see what I mean.”- Stuart Andrews, Editor, DevDawn.com
- “Dr. Explain presents an automated approach to creating very comprehensive help files quickly. Dr. Explain captures windows from a live WindowsR-based application and creates screenshots as you would expect, but then it analyzes the window content, enumerates the screens, and attaches numbered callouts to all the significant elements.
All captured windows are stored in a single project file. You can group them by modules, and when something changes, you can update individual windows, add new screenshots, and update control references. You don't need to recreate the whole sequence of windows.
With Dr. Explain, you can customize the structure of the menus, screen layout, colors, and callout details. Then you just export the project to HTML. You get instant online help complete with index page, menus, hyperlinked callouts, and professional screens all formatted and ready to upload to your server.”- Marnie Hutcheson, New Stuff column Editor, MSDN Magazine
