Shalom Help Maker

With a pretty self-explanatory name, Shalom Help Maker is a free Windows help file builder that provides all the necessary tools to create a comprehensive help manual.

You may find the interface a bit overwhelming at the first look and one thing is pretty clear: this is far from being a well-organized interface, but it serves its purpose and still helps the program get the job done.

Besides the fact that it doesn't need a standalone word processor, Shalom Help Maker offers all the tools you need when creating help files, including links, images, popup windows, highlighting and many formatting options such as colors, layout and alignment.

Obviously, a search tool is also there to make sure you can find a page with ease, but Shalom Help Maker also boasts a content and index utility to help you keep track of the files. Plus, you need to fill in a keyword text box on every single page, which also lends you a hand when trying to find a specific page.

The “Tools” menu holds lots of features, including the possibility to insert various components, such as popup links, targets, jump to a target or to another page, images, bullets, boxes or execute macros.

The app sports a dedicated keyword editor and a page organizer, but also a preview utility to see your content as you update a page.

The footprint on hardware resources is really minimal and Shalom Help Maker works without a flaw on every single Windows workstation out there.

Which leads us to a rather simple conclusion: with a few updates, including an interface redesign, Shalom Help Maker could become one of the top products in this particular software category. It has a lot of great features, that's for sure.