I work for a small startup business which provides a service composed of software and hardware (medical device).
My job is to provide tech and general support for questions about anything from how to use software to shipping and discounts.
There are hundreds of questions in total, with a few dozen being the most common ones.
With time, all the questions have been gathered in a long (very long) Word text file.
It’s hard to navigate it by keywords and find the right solution.
I’m looking for a software that will reach the right answer by navigating through menus to reach the answer text and copy it.
For example, if I get asked a question about testing the main hardware part, I will start the program and go to Hardware>>>>>Main Part>>>>>test.
Then the program should show the text for the answer, and copy it (like CTRL-C) to my clipboard, so I can email it.
The program should be adaptable so I can add other “branches” and other solutions, or change the texts.
Does anyone know such a piece of software or what keywords I should look for?
It sounds like a simple set of web pages with links to each other would do what you want. Are you familiar with HTML? If so, it should be easy to create the pages. If not, there are many tools that would allow you to create a web site like this.
You’re maintaining a knowledge base (there’s your keyword!).
You seem to be looking for a note organizer that works with a hierarchy (nested levels of folders or something similar). From what you describe, you would be the only person using it (will that still be true in 3 years?).
Simplest thing: use the outlining view in Word to organize your large document in a hierarchy. Your individual notes would be text paragraphs (“body text”) in the outline.
You could also use a brute-force approach, storing the hierarchy as folders (directories) on your disk. You’d save each note as an individual Word document, then place these documents in the appropriate folders. So your “Documents” folder on your computer would contain a directory called “Hardware”, which would contain a subdirectory called “Main Part”, itself containing a sub-subdirectory called “Test”, and your note would be there.
Information managers based on hierarchies were popular around the turn of the century. Then, people came to realize that hierarchies are usually not sufficient. The document for resetting the limit sensor on your device could go under Hardware–LimitSensor–Reset but also under Software–LimitOverrunError. It would be a pain to maintain the document in two locations.
The alternatives usually come in two forms: search engines and tags. Your note about resetting the limit switches would be tagged with “Limit” and “Reset”. Your note about resetting the circulation pump would have “Pump” and “Reset”. When you need to find a note, you just click on some appropriate tags and the software filters the notes to show only those that match the tags.
If, in six months, you determine that this problem happens often at Shriners Hospital in Denver, you can add “ShrinersDenver” as a tag too. It doesn’t involve reorganizing folders, it’s just an additional bit of information that will help you search for your notes.
Agree with what all the others said - and just wanted to emphatically agree with Heracles - hierarchies will only work if the information is already very discrete and ordered and can be guaranteed to stay that way (spoilers: reality does not often work that way - you’re going to find that a question has two different answers, and in many cases, two different questions have the same answer).
Tagging and keyword indexing are going to be killer features in whatever solution you apply here.
In Word you can create a “table of contents” and/or an “index”.
A table of contents doesn’t have to be single-valued or ordered: you can create the table of contents and link it to questions in any order. You can even compile it into a MS help file (ancient technology that needs more ancient technology). Just click on the item to jump to the text.
Then either select the text and export to email, or add a menu button that does that as required.
If this thing is going to grow and someone (especially you) are going to have to maintain it I would get it out of Word ASAP. Capture the knowledge in a system designed for purpose earlier rather than later, and as Mangetout says - capturing keywords and phrases as tags is going to be a critical thing to do. You won’t be able to predict how users end up navigating. Whilst a hierarchical view might make sense to you, and help with generally maintaining things, it often presupposes more knowledge than a user has. There is a reason they need help. Needing to know what the answer is, in order to be able to find it is never a great start. Even knowing that something is possible not going to be universally understood. (I hate FAQs that are a huge list of questions like “How do I perform an inverse manifold ventricle conjunction?”. Which is then typically answering with a whole lot of pictures of menus. Even worse are FAQs with questions like "Can I perform a XXX? With the answer “Yes! Since version Y <idiotic-software> can do XXX”)
I started trying out Word as a way for better organization.
It totally screwed up the fonts as I copied them from the Word document to the ticketing software…
For now, we prefer to send customers the answers individually, instead of letting them search the database.
We don’t have that many customers, and we give each one a personal and professional answer.
If the company becomes successful, we might put integrate a QA thing into the website.
Time will tell. I’m just an employee!
Are there freeware/non-expensive knowledge base solutions?
Not sure how much my boss is willing to spend here.