The help system

Help is accessible from the “Help and training” link in the main staff menu page, but also from the help icon (usually a question mark) in the header of every screen in RefTracker.

Help for the particular screen from which help was invoked, is presented whenever you click on the Help icon. But access to the entire help system is always available through the header bar and left hand table of contacts bar.

The system opens in “Help by Page”, where the Contents bar on the left hand page provides access to help for each page in RefTracker, grouped under Client, Staff and Administrator/supervisor.

The help system points to a hosted web site where the help is kept up to date for the release that you are using, by Altarama, however it is possible to have it point to a local copy of the help (System administrators should see parameters 80.18 and 19 in the rare instance where you might need locally stored help files).

Using help by page

In the left hand column –

Contents : click on any of the section headings in this bar, then the Help by Page heading, to see the complete list of pages.  Click on the page name to see the help for that page.

Search (in the left hand column): enter a search term to find “Help by pages” that are relevant to that topic.

In the header bar you can access the full set of RefTracker manuals:   

Help by page: click this at any time to return to the Help by page only. 

Client, Staff, Supervisor and Administration: click any of these Manual names to view that RefTracker manual only (see the following information for details of how to use the manuals). 

Other information: other RefTracker manuals such as the Dynamic Lookups and Support manuals will be linked into this section.

Search (in the header bar): enter a search term to search across BOTH the “Help by pages” and all the RefTracker manuals.

Using the manuals 

When you click on a manual name the system will show you the first page of the manual in the right hand column and in the left hand column:

Search: enter a search term to find pages from this manual that are relevant to that topic. 

Download the Full PDF manual: click here to download a printable copy of this manual – beware some of the manuals are more than 15mb in size.  This is the same printable version that is also available from our support site.

Table of contents for this manual: click the topic that you need to view, and it will display in the right hand panel.  Some topics will show subtopics in the Table of contents once they are clicked.

 At the bottom of each page the following features are provided:

  • links to the previous and next pages in the manual so you can read this manual like a book.
  • “Report a problem” link so that report any errors that you find, including issue with the accuracy or scope of help provided by this manual.
  • “Request assistance” link so that you can ask for help if you cannot find the information that you need in this online help and manuals system.

Note that this help is appearing in a separate web browser window and so operates like any other web browser application. Your usual browser tool bars will appear in this window giving you easy access to browser functions such as Back, and Print (for printing individual pages). To find a word in a page use Ctrl f (or Edit/Find from your Browser menu).

 To close the help system, simply close the web browser window that it is in.

Exercise:

Review the contents of the help screen that you have been automatically presented with and note that it provides help for the RefTracker page you were on. Try using some hyperlinks in the header bar and Table of contents, to move to related information.

Click on Staff in the Contents header bar and trying viewing some of the pages from this manual using the topics in the Table of contents.

Try the ability to move to the previous and next help screens using the navigation links at the end of each page.

Try using Search in the left hand column for information in the Staff manual, and then search for the same topic using Search in the header bar – notice the wider range of results when using the header bar search that searches the whole site.

Don’t forget that you can also use Ctrl f to search for a topic within a page.

Close the help system by clicking on the X in the top right hand corner of its browser window, when you are confident with how to use the help sub system.

 When a menu entry is followed by this icon, clicking on that menu entry will always open that function in a separate window (indicating that it is safe to use it while you are still using another RefTracker screen).

(      ) When a menu entry is followed by this icon, clicking on the form or function name in the menu list will open that form or function in the main RefTracker window, but clicking on just this “Optionally open in sub window” icon will open that form or function in a separate sub window allowing it to be used while still in another RefTracker screen. 

 The functionality provided by each of the entries in these header bars will be investigated in detail in the later sections of this manual.