General Support Guidelines

If you need support

Before you compose an email or reach for the phone please make sure you have looked through the Help file first.

If you have a question that the Help file doesn’t answer, or are reporting what appears to be a bug then we will be pleased to hear from you.

But if it is a question that is answered in the Help file then all we will do is point you to the relevant section, and you will just get an answer a little bit slower.

This is not meant to be awkward, but we try to keep our costs down to allow us to produce this high quality software at value-for-money prices. Answering support queries is an expensive undertaking.

OK, so the answer is not in the Help. What now?

Check the online Knowledge Base

Each of our products has a searchable knowledge base found through the Support page on each site. Enter keywords about your issue into the knowledge base and applicable solutions will be listed.

Make sure you are running the latest version

Open the program and click on the Help, About menu item to determine the version you are running.

Then check the product website (download page) to make sure you are running the latest version. (Some of our products provide an update link to a newer version, if available, right from the program About box.)

If someone else has reported the same problem it may already be fixed. We have a Revision History posted for our products at each website. If the problem you are experiencing has already been fixed, it will be in the Revision History.

That didn't help. What now?

Please contact us with your question.

To help us respond quicker and more accurately to your query, we will need, as a minimum, the following information:

Which of our products are you using?
In the case of error messages we’ll need the complete content of the message. Saying “I got an error message” is not enough. We need to know exactly what the error message said.
Details of your system configuration. We don’t need enormous detail at first, but will probably need to know at least what Operating System you are running and anything else you think might be relevant.
The version number of the product you are running. You can find the version number in the About box. For most of our programs you can access the About box from a menu by clicking Help, About.
A way to reproduce the problem. Basically a list of steps that you took, what you expected to happen, what did happen and (if it wasn’t a crash) why it isn’t what you expected.

There are also some things we don’t need. Please don’t send large attachments, copies of data files, the zipped up contents of your Windows directory, screenshots of four word error messages and the like. If we need copies of anything we will let you know, and let you know how to get them to us.