The Help Menu is available on all CROME windows (Main Screen, Report Items, Report Editors, Group Editors, Formula Editors, etc.).  It provides several useful functions for assistance in using CROME as well as reporting questions and problems to CROME Administrators.

• Enable / Disable Pop-up Help
  
• On Line User’s Manual
  
• Message of the Day
  
• Email Customer Support
  
• About CROME
  

When Enable Pop-up Help is selected:

Pop-up help becomes “active” and the Help Menu will change to allow you to “Disable Pop-up Help”.  While Pop-up help is active, you can move the mouse over selected areas of the window and a small yellow help-text window will appear, giving you information about the area that your mouse is over.

You may disable the “pop-up” any time by going back to the “Help” area and selecting the “Disable Pop-up Help” menu option.

Note that the pop-up help feature affects all CROME windows.  If you Enable pop-up help in one window, it is enabled in all CROME windows.  Similarly, disabling pop-up help will disable it for all CROME windows.

This entire manual is available on-line by selecting this option from menu.  You’ll notice there are “pull-right” menus that have the various sections of the manual:

After choosing one of these sections, CROME will launch your PC’s default browser (i.e., Internet Explorer, Netscape) and bring up the appropriate section of the user’s manual.

The Message of the Day gives information about the current state of the CROME system.  The text is managed by the CROME administrator, and may give information about software upgrades, data availability, new reports and formulas, etc.   The Message of the Day window appears every time you start CROME, and can be brought back up by choosing the Message of the Day option in the Help Menu.

This is an extremely useful tool to contact Customer Support with CROME issues.  When choosing Email Customer Support from the Help menu, a window appears to allow you to send any information directly to Customer Support:

What’s unique about this feature is that it not only emails the text of your message, but it also grabs mounds of useful internal CROME information that would help Customer Support address the problem.  For example, if you run a CROME report and choose to Email Customer Support, CROME will also email (if the appropriate checkboxes are selected as in the above picture) all information about the report you just ran, including the filter settings, the status, and all formulas used.  Also sent are all the internal Java and Operating Systems details as shown in the About CROME window (see below).  Armed with all of this information, Customer Support can much more quickly get to the root of any problem and help solve it.

The destination for the Customer Support email is configurable and is managed by your company’s CROME administrator.  I.e., depending upon the support arrangements, the email can go to your company’s local support group, Quantum’s CROME Product support staff, or both.

The About CROME window, which is brought up by selecting About CROME in the Help Menu, gives a great deal of useful information about your instance of CROME.  As well as supplying the usual vendor company information, this window shows the Version of CROME you are running and the “Build date” to indicate exactly which build of CROME this is. 

This window also examines your PC useful information such as: the version of “Java” you are running, including the Java Vendor (e.g., Sun Microsystems, IBM, etc.), and a large set of detailed information about the operating system and Java information.  This info could be useful in debugging problems, because unfortunately every version of Java has idiosyncrasies that make it run differently on different versions of your operating system.  CROME developers have gone to great lengths to ensure that the product works properly on all “approved” versions of Java and all standard versions of Windows, Solaris, MacOS, etc.  But if there is a problem with the software, especially with the look-and-feel, this is a good place to look for unorthodox versions of Java or other problems.