I hope you’ve been paying attention to Matt’s posts on the Company Blog lately! He’s been introducing all sorts of great new products and features we’re in the process of releasing for 2014. The developers have been busy!

Well, the training staff has been busy too! I want to take a minute to let you know about some of the changes we’ve made to the help and training resources we supply with our software.

• Spectra Help – Spectra 2014 has a brand new help system! The entire user guide has been moved to an online system. That means the user guides and HTML help will no longer be installed on your local system – they’re all online. When you click any of the help buttons in Spectra, the help page will open in your browser. Keeping the content online means we can continually update the documentation, providing you with the most up-to-date information possible. (It also saves you a bunch of hard-drive space!) Another bonus is that the process of recreating the help system gave us the chance to reorganize and rewrite a lot of the content. Our goal is to give you more easy-to-find “How To” material. Check out the new Spectra Online Help and let us know what you think!
• Help Menu – Several new links have been added to the Help menu in Spectra 2014, making it easy to find the “Getting Started Checklist” and other training resources.

  

• Stratus Help – Because Stratus includes three unique apps (Web, Mobile, and Desktop), presenting help and training resources becomes a bit more complex! Here’s where to find help with Stratus:
• Stratus Web has it’s own unique online help – Stratus Online Help.
• The Stratus Mobile app has it’s own chapter in the Stratus Online Help.
• Stratus Desktop is a bit different – it shares the Spectra documentation. Because Stratus Desktop and Spectra are essentially the same software (the database is just stored in a different location), instructions for Spectra also apply to Stratus. So currently, when you click a help button in Stratus Desktop, you’ll be taken to the appropriate page in the Spectra Online Help. To be honest, we’re not sure this will be our final solution. We’d love to know how it works for you!
• Submit a Suggestion/Feedback – Finally we encourage you to give us comments, suggestions, and feedback on all aspects of what we do. Use the Help menu in Spectra or Stratus to submit feature requests and suggestions. You can also leave comments at the bottom of any of our help pages, letting us know how we can better help you use the software.