Help Us Improve B&R Documentation - We Want Your Honest Feedback! 📚

[SyntaxError (Michael Schroeder)]

Hi everyone!

We’re on a mission to make B&R documentation work better for YOU, and we need your help.

Whether you’re navigating our online or offline Automation Help system, flipping through user’s manuals, or tracking down hardware specs and other accompanying documents in the Downloads section of our website, your experience matters to us. We know that finding the right information quickly can make the difference between solving a problem in minutes versus hours.

We’d love to hear about your real-world experience:

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?

All feedback is welcome – whether you’re an external customer working with B&R systems daily or an internal user. Positive experiences, constructive criticism, quick one-liners, detailed stories – it all helps us improve!

Your feedback will directly influence our documentation roadmap and priorities. At the end, we will provide a summary of our findings, highlighting the most common themes, suggestions, and feedback shared by our users. This summary will help us identify areas for improvement and recognize what is working well in our documentation resources.

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts!

[kovarj (Jaroslav Kovar)]

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)?

In fact, all of them that you listed. In the last few weeks, I have also started to use different AI assistants, which are not official documentation for sure but are providing very good results for some types of questions.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

If you know where to search, it is not difficult. Everything is about the search engine, and e.g., the engine on the B&R webpage could be better. The future, from my perspective, is the B&R AI assistant that would connect, index, and search all possible resources.

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?

3/5

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

Online documentation, easy to access, easy to search with possibility to store my local copy based on my search for offline use (if I’m somewhere where is not internet connection)

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?

From an official documentation point of view, a huge step forward was moving AS Help from offline to the online version. A small step with a huge effect. Moving documentation to the 21st century

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?

As mentioned many times: an AI assistant I ask my question to, and it provides me with a valid answer with a link to resources, no matter where it is stored. We can learn from IT world, there are great trends we can follow.

[valerio.manenti]

Hi @SyntaxError ,
thanks so much for the post!

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)?
google AI, from that I see if the information I need is inside Automation Studio Help or in the B&R Community. From B&R Community I see if I need to download training manual/user’s manual/github prj/watch webinar to get more data.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?
a) motion control: In Automation Studio you can control one axis at least in 6 different way with: 1) nc action (ACP10) 2) PLC Open (ACP10) 3) mapp Legacy (ACP10) 4) mapp 5.x 6.x (ACP10) 5) mapp 5.x 6.X (mapp Motion) 6) PLC Open (mapp Motion) …for new customer that doesn’t know all history of our system that is too much and regarding the Help there is no pages that give you an overview of them.
Example:

Autotune Acopos 1320 on induction motor

Hello, I want to do the function autotune on my Acopos 1320 with asynchrone motor (induction). I see on the blog i need tu use MC_BR_AutoTuneInductMotor_AcpAx Can you explen me step by step how to insert this FB into my program on AS4 (motion ACP10) ? Thank you Yoann

b) We need more context, background on the libraries: it seems the help is designed for B&R developers and not for normal user. I see in the help provided from our competitors general information about the topic before they explain the function or function blocks. Quite often we search the documentation for the same function/function block from our competitors to have a better understanding how they work.

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?
I should rate 3/5 but after we removed the links to download old Automation Studio versions the updated rate is 2/5. With new idea we are auto generating additional work, we see more help requests from customers.

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?
After years of youtube/facebook/meta/tik tok our brain is different than 20 years ago, unfortunately we watch more and more videos and we read less: I’m sure small videos integrated in the help will help a lot.

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?
Totally agreed with Jarolav, online version helps a lot! I can read them on my cell phone too, hard to imagine that in the past.

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?
For sure more examples in the Help.

Just few points, in the reality my list is longer.
Thanks
Ciao
Valerio

[michael_w]

@valerio.manenti

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?
After years of youtube/facebook/meta/tik tok our brain is different than 20 years ago, unfortunately we watch more and more videos and we read less: I’m sure small videos integrated in the help will help a lot.

Please No! The trend to have information in stupid (and more stupid if “AI voice” is used) videos rather than in 5 comprehensive sentences is not something we should follow.

@SyntaxError

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

On the online help sometimes harder than on the offline help, especially given that the content on the online help takes so much space and scrolling is therefore needed much more
Also, the most relevant results are often further down than expected…

@SyntaxError

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

Less pages that are only “The following topics are covered in this section:” - I expect to get to information and get a list of pages. Maybe just open the tree instead

Generally speaking I disagree with the /more AI/ sentiment here. The solution to better documentation is, if it’s hard to understand or to follow, to restructure or rephrase it, not throw more AI slop at it

Disclaimer: All of that is my personal opinion

[marcusbnr (Marcus Mangel)]

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)

All of the above! My go-to is the AS Help. However, if I know which module or hardware family I’m researching, I will often go to the manual if I can’t find what I need in the Help. The information available is often the same between the two, but sometimes being able to “Ctrl+F” a word or phrase within the entire manual makes it easier to find the information I need.

I find the website most helpful when I need information on a specific model or serial number. The exception to this is configuration part numbers (e.g., with PCs). These are not searchable and it takes a lot of clicks to find what’s included in a particular configuration.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

To echo others, if I know what I’m looking for then it is easy. My muscle memory within the AS Help is pretty good. But I do wish the search was more context-based as opposed to keyword-based. I see the value in an AI powered search, but I personally would just like to see a more helpful search box. For example, if I search “digital input module”, I would expect to be guided to information about I/O modules. Instead, I get this:

The first results are not really relevant, and every page that may be relevant has the exact same title. If I wasn’t familiar with how the Help system worked, I would be very confused here.

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?

It usually has everything I need. I really like the category selection at the top. However, I do think they could be organized a bit better. Each section is just an alphabetical list of every available file. This means that older upgrades with lower letters/numbers are listed first. There is also no grouping by version or hardware type. For example, if I want to look at Automation Runtime versions, I get a list that looks like this:

If I know exactly what I’m looking for, the text search box on the left is helpful. If not, I have to keep expanding the list until I see what I need.

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?

I would love to see more documentation in one place. I know this is not easy and maybe impossible, but I don’t care about that if I have a magic wand. For example, it would be amazing if I could go to one page and see

• Basic information about a piece of hardware
• The instructions to install and maintain the hardware
• Which Automation Studio versions the hardware supports
• Additional hardware/software pre-requisites (e.g., base modules, AS version)
• All relevant downloads (updated in real time)
• Relevant Community topics (this is a bit of a stretch even with magic, but it would be cool)

[SyntaxError (Michael Schroeder)]

Wow, thanks to everyone so far for sharing their experiences! There is already a lot of good material here to digest.

Be assured that we will be taking all of this feedback into consideration!

Looking forward to hearing what others have to say!

[hubert.brunner]

There is a lot of documentation available, which is great.
However, when it comes to searching on the B&R website and finding what I need, the experience can be challenging.

1. Downloadable manuals and the AS Online Help sometimes contain redundant information — and I need to rely on both being available in the same version. At the same time, there are valuable documents on the B&R website, such as the EMC manual or the Redundancy manual, which are not included in the AS Help.

2. The website search and download area require prior knowledge of how the B&R product portfolio is named and structured, which makes the search less intuitive .

3. AI‑driven search using Microsoft Copilot already provides good results and removes the need to know exactly where to look (AS Help, downloads, community, etc. ).

What I would love to see is a universal B&R search that integrates all current information sources — website, community, AS Online Help, and downloads. I want to get an AI digest with a list of links for deep diving. Probably the search agent helps me to refine my results by asking me typical questions a 1^st level support would ask me.
This unified search should provide clear context about software versions and make related content easier to explore. For example, if an AS Help article is referenced in a community discussion, why not show those discussions directly on the help page or allow users to leave comments or likes?

Of course, I could expand this wish list much further, but let’s stay realistic. I am looking forward to seeing how our documentation evolves — every initiative that improves the experience is highly appreciated.

[pavel.vavra]

Q: Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user manuals, Downloads section, etc.)
A: AS Help on the B&R website, Community, internal knowledge bases, …

Q: How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?
A: I strongly believe it depends on experience. If you get used to the structure of the AS Help and spend some hours browsing it, it’s definitely easier than if you start working with B&R.

Q: How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?
A: I have the same opinion as @marcusbnr.

@marcusbnr

However, I do think they could be organized a bit better. Each section is just an alphabetical list of every available file. This means that older upgrades with lower letters/numbers are listed first. There is also no grouping by version or hardware type.

Q: Any features or improvements you’d love to see?
A: Having one search input field that would search across all available sources (not only keyword search but also semantic search) and, if you’re logged in, even the internal ones.

Q: What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?
A: Getting Started sections in the AS Help.

Q: Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?
A: As mentioned, a single search input field.

[rafael.laury]

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)
AS Help 4 and 6 is my first go-to, then I usually check internal knowledge bases and B&R community. If more in-depth information is needed about a certain module, I will go to the User’s Manual (for hardware) or Revision History (for software) accessible from the Downloads section.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?
If I know what I am looking for, it is quite easy to find the needed information in AS Help, as others have mentioned (e.g. searching for “Order Data” when looking for a specific module, or entering the error code and getting the error description). However, doing a blind search in the AS or Online Help is challenging, the search function could be improved.

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?
In general good, the drop downs are useful. I have mixed results with the general filters. I think for customers the Downloads area has a lot going on and can be confusing. I prefer in general to search for whatever hardware I am dealing with and go to the Downloads tab of the product page as it has all (or most) of the relevant downloads needed. For AS or AR, I need to use the Downloads page, and I am usually able to find what I need. Finding exact Automation Runtime versions (e.g. X20CPx16x_F0412…) is not easy to search for, and as @marcusbnr mentioned, the grouping of ARs is cumbersome to work with.

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?
I have often found that there is information in the User Manuals that does not exist in the Automation Help. I have searched through many Help pages only to find the answer in an additional section that is only available in the manual. If all of the information in the Manual could somehow be in the Help as well, this would help with consistency.
I would also love to see Automation Runtime revision history in Automation Help, as currently every time I want to check it I have to download it from the website.

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?
All of the step by step guides in the Help (as Pavel mentioned the Getting Started guides) are very useful. The Technical Data pages and hardware module descriptions are in general always good as well.

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?
Make the Search bar of AS Help / Online Help as good as Google search.

[florent.boissadier]

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)

The main resource I use is AS Help. If I need more in-depth information, I use Community or my local B&R support. I also often check the Revision of Mapps components and AR in the Downloads section.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

To be honest, AS Help is really comprehensive. I can understand that for a new user, it might be hard to find what you need at first, but once you’ve used it for a while, you can easily find what you’re looking for.
So I would say it’s pretty easy to find information by using AS Help, Community, and B&R local support!

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?

It’s really nice! If you don’t use the filters or the search bar, there are a lot of things to sift through, but when you search for something specific, like the RevInfo of a particular AR version, it’s pretty easy to find!

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

A web search engine to search across all documentation resources (AS Online Help, Community, Downloads section) would be really nice!
I’d also like to see improvements in the Online Help search feature. Sometimes, it’s really hard to find what I’m looking for, but when I use the same search in AS Help, I find it directly.

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?

The all-in-one AS Help, with its getting-started guides and examples, is really nice. When I switch to other software to develop different things, the documentation is often split across multiple apps or manuals, which means I end up with so many windows open on my PC. When that happens, I really miss AS Help, where almost all the information is in the same window!

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?

A unified search tool that instantly pulls up results from all documentation sources (AS Help, Community, Downloads) without having to switch between them!

[JulianL]

Which documentation resources do you use most often?

My go-to source is AS Help 6, as we fully transitioned from AS4 to AS6. If i’m not able to find what I’m looking for, I’ll look into module specific manuals (where applicable), ask the B&R AI assistant or resort to ChatGPT. If those all fail, I’ll look manually into the community and write an email to our local office.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

I have to agree with many others, if you know what information you need, it’s easy to find. But as soon as you’re looking into a more general direction the provided documentaion by B&R gets chaotic and almost a pain to search through, hence the fallback to asking AI.

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?

Horrible. Keyword search is basically not working, current versions are hard to find, sometimes my colleague is able to find certain documents, while I follow the same path and somewhere along the way I just get stuck. Also sorting is a mess, categories are waay to cluttered and intransparent.

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

Our sales rep gave me the advice to use google to search for specific documents, so therefore I’d like the B&R search better index by the local search engine.

Also please give us the possibility to search for modules with OUR specific oder number (eg. we have an ACOPOS P3 8EI022HWDS0.0300-1, but searching for the documentation brings no results…. you have to “cut away” symbols at the end until it gives you the generic documentation…)

Please reduce the loading time of the downloads section on the website, if selecting a category it sometimes takes up to 30s just to load.

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?

Quality of most docs is quite good, even though sometimes hyperlinks lead to nowhere or no helpfull sites.

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?

I’d create a user section where you can find all the ordered products (with the possibility to add modules on your own) with the latest documentation attached, and the possibility to go into archives if needed.

[Jonas_Keller]

Hello

When I enter an error code from the logger, I just want the entry to this specific error.
Today I get a list with similar error codes and quite often the entered error code is missing.

For me a MUST is:

• there is an entry for every possible error code I can get on a B&R system
• the first result in the answer list is the answer to my entered error code

So a good Keyword search with exact results would be a good starting point.

[stranskyv (Vojtech Stransky)]

Hi,

first of all, thanks a lot @SyntaxError for the initiative! I think most of the following things were already mentioned, but I will still add my 2 cents.

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)

I am mainly using Automation Help, most of the time sticking with the offline version. I use user manuals and Downloads section for specific cases. Otherwise I am also using the Community, and online courses and training manuals from the Automation Academy.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

The search engine could definitely be better (both offline and online). It happens quite often, that even when I write exactly the name of the page I am searching for, it is not the top result. Also, in the online help, the path which is shown under the result is in German, which can only add to the confusion. For these reasons, I am basically using the search window only when searching for an error code, otherwise I just click and scroll through the tree to find what I need. However, this only works because over the years, I have learned what could be located where. I still remember how much I was struggling with this when I was new to B&R…

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?

Searching for product manuals is usually fine. Searching for AR upgrades and Technology Packages is quite a bit more cumbersome. If I for example search for “mapp Motion 6” (because I don’t know what exactly is the latest version and because I don’t know that it’s written as “mappMotion_6”), I first need to scroll through 100 versions of mappMotion_Codian, because the results are for some reason ordered alphabetically… I have found out that in this case it is actually much easier to use the general search through the complete website, instead of the search in the Downloads section.

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

Better search engine. Or maybe even better, make our help contents searchable by Google.

In some cases better documentation

• There are some pages, which are almost impossible to understand when you are new to the topic, and they only start making some sense, when you already know what you are doing (my favorite are the explanations of different compensation gear variants in cam automat…).
• Some pages, especially for mapp components configurations, contain the table which looks like the actual configuration file in AS. On one hand this is nice to have the same look and feel and it makes it easier to search for the setting you need. But on the other hand, there is often no other explanation than what is already visible directly in AS. What is the point then?

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?

The “Getting started” guides. Examples of some more complex use cases for some of the components. The fact that no matter the technology, basically everything can be found in the same help. Relatively consistent and clean look and organization of information across the pages.

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?

Searchability of our help from Google. This would already solve many issues and would also help to increase exposure.

Additional note: In one of the posts above, I have seen an idea to integrate videos. Please don’t! Or only as an additional form, but definitely not instead of the text. There is nothing worse than having to watch a video, just because I want to check one small thing.

These are just my opinions, so feel free to disagree. Also, I didn’t mean to sound too negative and I really appreciate all the documentation work done by everyone involved

[Frederic_Boyadjian]

Jumping in here — this pretty much lines up with my experience from a user perspective.

Q: Which documentation resources do you use most often?
A: Mostly offline documentation (habit + speed). I’ll also use manuals and product pages depending on what I’m doing.

Q: How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?
A: If I already know what I’m looking for and roughly where it is, it’s fine. But if I’m starting from scratch, it can be pretty tough. Honestly one of the harder ecosystems I’ve worked with when you’re in “search mode”.

Q: How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?
A: AR upgrades and Technology Packages are a pain to find. Fully agree with @stranskyv on that — it’s cumbersome.

Q: Any features or improvements you’d love to see?
A:

• For hardware, especially when you don’t know the product family well, selection guides would help a lot. Something like a comparison table to quickly see differences between products of the same family, like this example from Schneider Electric:

  

• The practical examples / how-tos you already have are great — I’d definitely like to see more of those over time.

• Also small thing, but having key info like dimensions directly visible on the product page (instead of having to open/download a PDF, STP, CAD, etc.) would make things quicker.

**
Q: What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?**
A: Coherent presentation of information and structure of the help. Once you find what you’re looking for, it’s usually accurate and complete. That’s important to keep building on, especially with AI tools coming in — they rely on good documentation as a source, not as a substitute for it.

Q: Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?
A: Something like being able to group or “pin” documentation per project/machine in one place would be really convenient.

If I had to sum it up: solid quality and coverage, but not always easy to find things when you’re not already familiar with the ecosystem.

[Frederic_Boyadjian]

Adding to my previous comment — I recently went through a motor selection exercise, and it reinforced some of the points I mentioned earlier about information being harder to find when you’re not already familiar with where things live.

Q: How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

• Not being able to compare motors across different families on the website. The compare tool works within a range, but not across (e.g. 8LS vs 8MS), unless I missed something, which makes early-stage selection less straightforward.

• Speed/torque curves can’t easily be compared between motors without having multiple tabs open at once.

• Compatibility between motors, cables, and drives isn’t very centralized.

• Information is available, but quite spread out. For example, connector types and cable cross-sections are in the motor specs, but then you have to go into drive manuals to find the corresponding cables.

Q: Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

• Ability to compare motors across families (not limited to a single range).

• Ability to overlay speed/torque curves from multiple motors for quicker performance comparison.

• A more centralized “selection guide” approach for motors/cables/drives (similar to something like the Lexium 32 docs), even at a high level with links to detailed pages. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a catalogue or manual — could just as well be a web page. (I know I reference Schneider a lot — gives away my background a bit )

  

This ties back to my earlier point — solid documentation overall, but the selection process still involves a lot of jumping between sources. Even when you know where to look, it’s not the most efficient workflow, and there’s some lost time there.

[seunghwa (Seunghwa Hyun)]

I’d like to make a small opinion as a non-English, German speaker, as I already have a lot of good feedback in the comments.

1. Even if install Automation Help in English, more than a few dozen documents are displayed in German. Some customers may have to work in an environment where the internet is not available, so they cannot interpret this without a translator. Additionally, the document is in English, but the image is often in German.

2. There are a lot of low-resolution images. Some customers are taking images as key information. In 2026, I think having a high resolution image is a good option. (I’m work on program code with 8-11px. )

The above two are the feedback I have heard mostly from customers in an environment where I have been using B&R for 10 years. 3 is my personal expectation.

3. It would be nice to have a search function for a specific purpose. For example, to build and send via the CLI, I had to search for command line documentation for each function individually. If a document has properties, you can find all the documents for command line in Automation Help with the command line or cli keyword only. (I can find the results I want even with the current searching feature, but I want to filter only the information I want a little more.)

[cesma2000 (M_z_C)]

Hello,

I am a software engineer and have worked with several versions of Automation Studio over the years (2.0, 2.7, 3.9, 4.0.4.2, 4.3, 4.5, 4.6, 4.9 now 6.5).
I have also had experience with other proprietary platforms Siemens, Allen-Bradley, Schneider, Omron.
Reading the different versions of B&R documentation and other brands over the years prompted me to ask myself a question as an automation professional:
Is it better to work with a very flexible platform where the weight and cost of development is more shifted to the platform (configuration, parametrization, programming style), or is it better to work with a less flexible platform that allows me to focus the cost of development more on the operation of the machine/plant?

Considering Automation Studio to be a platform with ambitions of being of the first kind, then the B&R documentation (offline documentation, AS6’s online documentation is terrible) has always been inadequate and remains so today, both organizationally and argumentatively. Just to start:

• terrible English translations,
• inadequate or missing examples (often incorrect example code),
• non-self-conclusive arguments with too many argumentative references,
• there is no real reading order, but it seems more the result of various experiences
  empirical done at the desk and not in the field.

Since I also frequently deal with documentation (manuals, analysis, and requirements drafting), I don’t think what’s being offered today can be improved; the approach would need to be completely rethought.
Inductive Automation represents an example of how nowadays you can produce support material in cutting-edge ways (for the automation industry) for your development platform (they simply copied and customized what Microsoft did for Visual Studio).

[Andy_Walker]

Which documentation resources do you use most often? (Automation Help, user’s manuals, Downloads section, etc.)

Automation Studio Help primarily. I prefer the old-school Help application rather than the online help. I don’t really have a good reason why - perhaps it’s just what I’m used to, perhaps I have too many tabs open in my browser and I find I lose the Help tab Also, sometimes the links in the online help are broken.

I use the online help more for APROL, because it’s available without having to log into my engineering server, but it’s not a great experience - see below.

How easy (or difficult) is it to find what you need?

Automation Studio Help:

It’s usually pretty easy. The search is okay, although fuzzy search would be a nice improvement.

One exception is the documentation for the unit test framework, which only appears when you install the unit test technology package - which isn’t great when you’re trying to figure out how to enable unit tests! Similarly for Mapp services in AS6.

Another thing that could be improved is that the documentation for I/O modules only references the modules’ registers - not their graphical configuration pages within Automation Studio. These normally map up relatively well but that’s not always the case - the most recent issue being the osc trace function on an X20AI4632, where the config pages have some options which don’t map cleanly to registers and thus have no help available.

Generally though, Automation Help is great. We’ve only had to contact Support once in the last four years due to not being able to find info in the Help file.

APROL documentation:

It’s really difficult to find anything in the APROL documentation. The search isn’t great, info is scattered over multiple manual pages, and errors don’t tend to come with an error number and pasting them into search doesn’t usually find anything relevant. Quite often, I have tried to search for info in the manual and not found it, only to stumble across it later by accident while looking for something else.

Some things are entirely missing - for instance, the documentation on the EventDriver has a lot of low level information on how it works, but no info on how to actually set a variable to use the EventDriver within APROL.

Other things are in non-obvious places. For instance, when trying to figure out how many bytes a certain type took up, I found that typing in ‘variable types’ or ‘pv types’ into APROL Help doesn’t come up with anything useful. It was a year and a half later that I realised that the Help menu in CAE Manager has an additional entry for the table of PV types!

The manual links in the help.br-automation.com version of the documentation are also often broken - they either lead nowhere, or they lead to a German version of the page.

How would you rate the usability of our Downloads section?

It’s pretty good. I was going to write that it needed to be faster for full text search, but I see that has been fixed! Good work.

Any features or improvements you’d love to see?

In the help.br-automation.com help browser and search results, middle clicking or ctrl-clicking a link should open it in a new window. Neither of these work on search result pages. On actual help pages, middle clicking works but ctrl-clicking doesn’t.

As mentioned above, I’d like to see Automation Studio Help cover individual settings within modules’ graphical config pages.

It might be handy to have a bit of documentation for both Automation Studio and APROL that explains how the C code is preprocessed and where to find the preprocessed output. I’ve occasionally used this to untangle cryptic compiler errors which didn’t make any sense given the code I’d written.

APROL documentation should follow the example of Automation Studio Help - every error should have an error number which leads to more information about that error and, if applicable, troubleshooting steps.

What works really well that we should definitely keep doing?

Bundling the data sheets for every hardware module into Automation Studio Help makes it a large and slow install, but it’s incredibly useful when you need to quickly look up the capability of a particular module - no need for internet connectivity or to download anything.

The code examples for various Automation Studio libraries are invaluable.

Bonus question: If you could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about our documentation, what would it be?