Context-sensitive help

Most development environments support Help Context ID integration. When building your application, you can assign help IDs to interface elements like dialog boxes, buttons, lists, and settings. After compilation, your program will display the relevant help topic for each UI element based on its ID.

What does this mean for users? When users open help from any part of your application, the guide automatically opens to the page describing that specific feature. Context-sensitive help lets people find answers faster.

By setting up Help Context IDs, you create happier users who find what they need instantly. Dr.Explain supports contextual help identifiers: you can automatically assign these IDs to all your topics.

How does Dr.Explain handle context-sensitive help IDs?

Dr.Explain automatically assigns unique Help Context IDs to each topic. These IDs let you link help topics directly to specific elements in your application's user interface.

Examples of user documentation created in Dr.Explain

The collection of user guides created with Dr.Explain keeps growing and now spans many fields. Below are real documentation samples in different formats:

What are the benefits of using Dr.Explain?

Help Context IDs connect interface elements to specific help topics, giving users instant access to relevant information. This improves the user experience by eliminating time-consuming searches through the entire documentation.

Well-structured documents. Create logically organized projects that are easy to scale and maintain.

Clear navigation. Help users find information quickly and master instructions faster.

Flexible export options. Generate documentation in popular formats from a single project, with no coding required.

Create professional, user-friendly guides efficiently — all within one help authoring tool.

What type of users is Dr.Explain suited for?

Dr.Explain works for authors at any skill level — from complete beginners to experienced professionals. It delivers high performance, modern content tools, and flexible pricing for everyone.

Here’s where it can help you:

• create polished user documentation quickly;
• use an all-in-one tool — capture screens, auto-annotate, and export to multiple formats;
• build online help without technical skills;
• apply custom styling to match your brand;
• embed custom code or widgets into your guides;
• enable team collaboration on the same document.

Users about contextual Help IDs in Dr.Explain

"Using Dr.Explain, we not only have created a context-sensitive help system, but also made it user-aware. This way, we sort of provide a different help system based on the user’s privileges".

Robert Sibilski, CEO and chief programmer of Siborsoft

Interview with Robert

"We are very happy with our current help docs and the integration with our tools. From any dialog or panel in the software, we can now click on Help and open the relevant page in the docs. I think our main focus going forward will be to create more videos and embed these directly in the docs".

Are Tømmerås, Senior Geologist

Interview with Are

Frequently Asked Questions

Also check

• Creating Help Context ID map files
• Automatic assignment of Help Context ID identifiers to topics
• HTML Templates - Pre-built Themes for Online Docs