Features in the product help system
Help home page
When you first open the help system, the help home page displays. The page includes links to important help topics, especially those topics that you can use to get started with the product. The help home page also links to other IBM, Rational, and product-specific websites where you can find more resources and information.

Contents
The help topics are organized in
a navigation tree in the contents view. To expand and collapse the
navigation, either click the plus and minus
icons or double-click the topic titles. To open a topic,
click its title.
- To return to topics that you viewed, in the topic toolbar, click
the Go Back
and Go Forward
icons. You can use these icons to access the browser history of your current session, but you cannot use them to go to the previous or next topics in the contents view.
- If you opened many branches of the navigation tree and want to
return to the starting state with all of the branches closed, click
the
Collapse All icon.
Index
You can also use the index to browse
to topics. The index points you to topics that describe a particular
word or phrase. To use the index, click the Index tab in the Contents pane. Either type a term to find it in the
alphabetically ordered list of index terms or use the Previous and Next links
to browse the list. Click a term to see its corresponding topic.


Links to related topics
A topic contains an independent unit of information; for example, all the steps to complete a task, a complete description of a concept, or a whole lesson in a tutorial. Most topics are related to other topics and include links to those related topics, either in the text or, more commonly, at the end of the topic.
- To find more information that is related to the current topic, browse the topics near it in the contents view and browse the links to its related topics.
- Breadcrumb links indicate the location of the topic in the hierarchy of the help contents. To go to the corresponding topic, click a breadcrumb link.
- To decide whether to open a topic, hover your mouse pointer over the topic link to display a short description of the topic.
Contents view and topic synchronization

