Today’s post is by Jessica Barber, one of our tech support specialists.
If you ever find yourself confused about how to do (or undo!) something in COATS, you’ve got a few different ways to get an answer. Of course, you can always contact our awesome Technical Support Crew, but if it’s after hours or you’re out of tech-support time, you’ve got other options in the form of documents.
Food for thought: Document – any written item, as a book, article, or letter, especially of a factual or informative nature.
COATS provides different documents to reference: the COATS manual, our White Papers and “What’s New”:
- The COATS manual comes up whenever you click F1 while working in COATS. The document itself is a PDF, so you must have Adobe Reader installed on your system to view it. The manual is organized with an interactive table of contents, making it easy to find what you’re looking for. To access the desired section, hold down the CTRL key and click on the section of your choice.
- White Papers are instructional documents that give you step-by-step directions through different processes in COATS. These instructions guide the user from setup to completion of the selected procedure. These white papers are available on the download page of COATSsql or COATS Standard, under the version update they’re associated with.
- Last but not least, we have the “What’s New” document that is created in correspondence with every COATS version release. This lists all the items that have changed in the recent update, separated by the section to which each change is related. Some new features may include minor changes to procedures, such as where to access a new report. For new features that include new or significantly altered processes, you can reference the relevant white paper.
A new “What’s New” is released with every new version or update of COATS. Not all new versions have White Papers, just those with new or significantly changed processes. The manual is not updated with each version, although a new version of the manual was released earlier this year. If you’ve got a question and can’t find the answer in the manual, pulling the What’s New and the White Papers can usually fill in the blanks.
Of course, if all else fails and these resources leave you with further questions users can always call Technical Support. But when you put them all together, these files are almost as good as speaking with us. After all, who do you think puts them together?
If you’d like to contact Jessica for help that can’t be found in these documents, you can call our Tech Support specialists at 1-800-888-5894.