A5Doc is an addin utility that I wrote and Alpha sells. It was automatically installed with Alpha Five version 5, even though a purchased key was required to use it after the trial period. For Alpha Five version 6, A5Doc can be downloaded from Alpha's web site or mine in order to use the trial period.
Without naming names, it came to my attention that some people may not be taking full advantage of A5Doc. So what is new? Most of us probably use less than 10% of most programs, even those we use frequently. However in this case the renowned Alpha Five expert had never even seen the A5Doc main menu. Instead this user always did context sensitive documentation. (More on that later.) That is like buying MS Word and then just using the standalone document viewer.
I hope there are legions of A5Doc users, well at least purchasers. For those of you, make sure you have seen the following images on your Alpha Five desktop. If not, there may be parts of A5Doc that you could find handy in the future.
First is the aforementioned main menu. If you feel you are getting good value from A5Doc without seeing this, I have a pleasant surprise for you. Just right click on white space in the control panel and select addins, A5Doc. You should see this:
Document whatever you want. The highlight above is on Scripts, so either double click it, or press the Process button and following is one of the screens that pops up.
If you do anything except One Step Doc, you will see a print preview of the results, which I often do not print. One Step Doc does everything, and assumes there is more output than you really want to print. It goes straight to the global search screen shown below.
In this case I have already done a search, and highlighted a line of code. From here the Edit button will open this script in the Alpha Five code editor with the cursor positioned to the highlighted line. With this, finding and making changes can be pretty quick. There is no Find and Replace because I don't want A5Doc to be in the business of modifying your apps.
Most of the power of A5Doc is being able to work with multiple documented objects at once. But let's get back to the context documentation. I use this when a single object is my focus. Just right click on, say, a table to get the following menus.
I hope this has been elementary for you. In future newsletters I will give some short tips that may make your use of A5Doc even more productive.
Bill Parker is an independent Alpha Five consultant in Dallas, TX. He can be reached at bill@partec.net or www.partec.net.