Day 23: Help Menu

September 20, 2005

Realizing that a lot of you may be trying Opera for the first time today (since Opera is now free) so I wanted to make sure you knew how to get help if you need it. You might be tempted to ignore the Help Menu, but don’t! There’s good stuff tucked in there.

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Opera Help (F1 in Windows, CMD+? on Mac)

Takes you to http://help.opera.com/help. Yes, Opera’s help files are online. The good part is that they can be updated as needed and everyone will instantly get the proper information. Translations can also be added and, by using automatic version and language detection, you can get the help files you need - and only the files you need. So there are trade-offs, like just about everything else in life. It can be a pain to have to download them (and of course this assumes that you will be online when you need help. The good news is that once you get to the help files, the information that is there is very useful.

Community

Takes you to my.opera.com which we’ll talk about on Day 30: My Opera. Suffice it to say that it’s the offical community support site with forums, journals, and more.

Support

Takes you to www.opera.com/support where you’ll find documentation, tutorials, the Opera knowledge base, and even a place to report Opera bugs. Oh and if you are new to Opera this is the place for you!

Check for a new release

Make sure you’re using the latest release of Opera. Note that this applies to final releases only, not betas. For that you’ll need to check the Opera Beta Forum.

Report a site problem

Windows:
[ Report a problem, Windows version ]

Mac OS X:
[Report a problem, Mac version]

A new feature to quickly report a website that does not work properly with Opera. It is critical to make sure that you enter a clear and succinct explanation of the problem, such as “Menu on left side of page does not expand properly” or “Unable to click links on top navigation”

It is also important to make sure to correctly categorize the problem: 1) minor annoyance, 2) major problem, or 3) site unusable.

About Opera

Highly useful information about your Opera installation. Also accessible by typing opera:about into the Addressbar. If you need to know your build number, or where Opera is installed, or where your profile directory is stored, this is the place to find it.

Note: MacOpera places the “About Opera” menu item under the Mac OS X standard “Opera” menu item (top left, rather than the help menu which is top right).

So that’s the Help Menu. Don’t forget about the built-in Opera help search functions (see Day 20: search.ini for a reminder).

Don’t forget: registered customers get email support. Login to https://support.opera.com/bin/customer/.

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