Simple way to add a new toolbar?

Help & Support
1

I pass this on as a suggestion as to how to make life a little bit easier for the neophyte.

I have just looked in the obvious places for a way to add a new toolbar.

I started with >>View>>Toolbars.

Then I went to Settings and tried a couple of things there.

Nowhere could I see an entry that said "New" related to toolbars.

"Industry standard" – make that Office and Firefox – seems to be:

View>>Toolbars>>Customise

Then they let you add a new one.

After faffing around with the PD Help file – it does not by the way, respect the "toolbars NEAR new", query, unless your idea of "near" is very flexible – I eventually found something in "Customize - Toolbars". It says:

Where is the "New button"?
All I can find is a "New" menu under file, but that is about creating documents.

I know that I will eventually find what I am looking forward. But it is all a bit counterintuitive and divorced from the aforementioned industry standard.

Is there any way to add "New" to the toolbars menu?

2

Settings -> Customize -> Toolbars Tab -> Click New Toolbar Icon

3

Excellent.

Will try to work out how to add a menu button to cut to the chase?

What happened to the "New button" mentioned in the Help file?

Or is that the one at the end of your sequence?

4

It's where Chrtistiaan has pointed you to. It's not a button with letters N,e, and w on it but an image- button named New.

5

You miss the point. I don't need lessons on what buttons look like. I need lessons in how to navigate DO on the basis of information in the Help file.

Go back to the original message. There you will see what I went through to find how to create a new toolbar.

The Help file did not describe the sequence that Christiaan very helpfully provided.

Searching the help file for "new toolbar" shows only stuff about how they have changed things.

The index in the PDF version of the Help file does not have an entry for "Toolbar, create new".

Unfortunately, the PDF version is also protected so that users cannot bookmark or annotate it for future reference.

I realise that it is poor form to go on about the Help file, but it is the place where most newcomers start when they want to do something.

6

I guess DO help assumes some level of knowledge of an user who goes beyond Windows Explorer.

I am against stuffing into help every possible procedure. It would just make important information hard to find, and actually decrease help's usefulness.

7

Part of the problem seems to be that people are unwilling to read (or at least scan) through the whole help file. Instead, they come across something they want to do, do a cursory and unsuccessful search of the help file to try to find out how, and assume it's the help file that's at fault.

I'm in no way claiming that the help file/manual is perfect but this information is all in there. More over, I don't believe that this procedure (creating a new toolbar) is actually all that difficult.

You say that View -> Toolbars -> Customize is an "industry standard". Well, Opus has a Customize command as well. Ok, it's in the Settings menu, not View -> Toolbars, but it's not exactly hidden, and not a great leap to think that editing toolbars may have something to do with program settings.

Once you've found the Customize dialog, there's a Toolbars tab which one would think is fairly obviously related to the matter at hand, and from there it's only a short hop to the buttons at the top of the dialog that let you, among other things, create new toolbars.

I guess what I'm saying is, maybe stop relying on the help file to answer your specific questions (unless you're prepared to read through the whole thing) and just have a play around with the program itself and actually look at what's there. All the buttons have tooltips which do describe what they do. Again, it may not be 100% "industry standard" but by the same token I don't really think anything in Opus is rocket science.

8

I agree with that, but I also agree with this:

It's a bit difficult to find when new users really don't know where to look. Toolbars page? Where do I find the Toolbars page... Customize? Where do I find Customize...

eb43b8964778b93bab469fc8668851a27e5ceabe.png908×365 35.2 KB

9

If an user has problems with figuring it out, he's asking for troubles using DO.

10

But there's always this great forum :wink:

11

[quote="Xyzzy"]I guess DO help assumes some level of knowledge of an user who goes beyond Windows Explorer.

I am against stuffing into help every possible procedure. It would just make important information hard to find, and actually decrease help's usefulness.[/quote]
I agree. Don't stuff it with useless rubbish.

In this case, all it needed was an index entry. I even sugegsted where to put it.

Afterwards, I thought that another place for it would have been in the long bit of the index given over to "New".

I think you'll agree that two lines in an index hardly counts as "stuffing into help every possible procedure."

Indexing is a specialist and skilled "art". Done properly, it allows people to find all sorts of stuff. Done badly, and a good document is less useful than it might be.

12

Absolutely, expect when the comments come in from people who think that ordinary people should steer clear of DO.

Thank you for your help in tracking down that one.

I'll be back. You have been warned....

13

I'm not sure but I suspect the indexing and searching is handled automatically by Microsoft's Help browser so improving it may not be straightforward. (i.e. It might be like getting stuff to be ranked higher on Google.)

14

You may be correct there. That's why I prefer to use the PDF file and something like X1, which gives me more control over the search logic..

As the PDF is said to be a mirror of Help, that should work fine.

PDFs can even offer better indexing.

In the case of OP, neither is adorned with the hyperlinks that you would expect. And, as I have said, having a PDF file that I cannot annotate means that I cannot add my own bookmarks and hyperlinks. (I use Acrobat, rather than Adobe Reader.)

I must find time to investigate why the PDF file is locked up in that way. There must be a reason. Otherwise, why bother to make life harder for customers?