Here are some tips to help you create good, functional guides with Guide Line Maker™.
General Information
The easiest, quickest and best way to create a guide is to start with a schedule. Use Time Line to create a schedule for your project that is as complete as possible. Then read that schedule into Guide Line with the Guide Line Readers. If your Time Line schedule is complete and generalized, then all you will need to do in Guide Line is to parameterize and add dialogs. A good rule of thumb is that one-third to one-half of total guide development time should be spent in Time Line.
Selecting a Project
Start with a good project. A good project is one that...
...will be used repeatedly. Choose a project that will be repeated in some form throughout your organization. A project such as creating a brochure will most likely be done a number of times and is a logical choice for a guide.
...is specific enough to be well defined. Choose sub-projects that are easy to understand and set limits on. A guide for creating a small user manual will be more effective than a guide for making books of all types.
Task Groups
Guides follow an outline format. When grouping tasks in your outline make sure to form logical groups of a usable size. These groups of tasks will appear as the task checklists throughout your guide. Having many groups that are too small (less than 3 tasks per group) can make the guide feel tedious and tiresome to the user, while having groups that are too large (greater than 15 tasks) can overwhelm the user.
Staffing
Use Time Line to generalize the staffing of your guides. Before you read your Time Line schedule into Guide Line, create a generalize resource list in Time Line with resources that reflect the "action/modifier" required for tasks (i.e. write/tech and write/mkt for technical writer and marketing writer). While still in Time Line, assign these resources to their logical tasks (i.e. assign write/tech to the task "write the user guide"). When you read the schedule into Guide Line, the resulting guide will have a generalized staffing list and all tasks will have the appropriate resources assigned to them. By creating the staffing list and assignments in Time Line you will have saved yourself a great deal of typing in Guide Line.
Parameters
After reading in the schedule, you will then parameterize it to allow the user to choose what is unique to his specific project. When choosing what to parameterize, focus on the tasks that determine the critical path of the project. These are the tasks that will have the most effect on the schedule and where the user should focus. Items that parameterize best are those that linearly scale or can be broken down into small groups (i.e. 0-50, 50-100, 100+ or low, med, high).
Do not over-parameterize the guide. Limit the parameters to the most logical cases for the project. If you have too many parameters in your guide, then guide de-bugging becomes an enormous task since all combinations of parameters must be tested to ensure that the guide is correct. Also, too many parameters will make the guide cumbersome to use. A good rule of thumb to follow is that no more than 12 of 50 tasks will be effected by parameters (formulas).
Variables
Most variables should be defined in the top-level procedure, and most dialogs (questions to the user) should be asked here. This way the variables and user input will be available to all sub-procedures. Variables are available to all levels below where they are defined or set.
Use separate define statements for each variable and comment each define statement to indicate the variable use. This makes the guide code much easier to understand.
Dialogs
Build dialogs incrementally. First create your dialog just to gather the necessary information. Then add additional features (such as bitmaps). Then work on the layout of the dialog. By creating dialogs in this manner, you ensure that the dialog is functioning correctly before adding the complexity of bitmaps and layout.
Bitmaps
Put all bitmaps associated with the guide in the \guides directory and do not specify a path to this directory. When no path is specified, Guide Line will use relative path information to find the guide line directory (\glw) and then look for the \guides directory in the Guide Line directory. If a path is specified within your guide, then the guide will only find bitmaps in the exact specified path and can fail on other users machines (i.e. If you have Guide Line installed in c:\glw and a user has it installed in d:\glw, then specifying no directory for bitmaps will work correctly on both machines as long as the guides are placed in the \glw\guides directory. But if you specify c:\glw\guides for the bitmaps, then the guide will not run correctly on the user's machine.)
Task Linking
If 'task X' is in an IF statement and may therefore not be created, then create redundant links between child tasks of 'task X' and the parent task of 'task X' (i.e. if task 2 may not be created, then create a link between task 1 and task 3. This way, if task 2 is created, then it will be the controlling predecessor to task 3 and if task 2 is not created, then task 3 will correctly have task 1 as its predecessor).