Bring back the help panel, again!

Hi ​@takashi!

This is an intentional change. The embedded Help window has been removed in 2025.1 in favor of the full browser-based help, which offers search functionality and better content display.

I understand this may impact your workflow if you relied on the quick embedded help, however there’s a new feature where clicking on transformers (or other canvas objects) can automatically navigate to the relevant help section in the full Help window.

Alternatively, if it was the offline access you preferred, you can download the documentation as Option 1 in this article mentions: 

https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/30138756206733-Offline-Help-Documentation-Removed-from-FME-Form-2025-0

I hope this helps! 🙂

Ohno 😐

Hi ​@desiree_at_safe ,

Thank you for your clarification. I understood that the Help application has been enhanced. It's great that the Help synchronizes with Workbench.

However, using two application main windows simultaneously on the single display is just annoying for the user, in general. We therefore prefer to use the Data Preview (previous Visual Preview), rather than FME Data Inspector while editing a workspace.

It would be great if the Help window could be docked to Workbench interface.

Thank you for sharing that feedback ​@takashi! I understand this pain point better now. Managing applications on a single display does sound disruptive and cumbersome. 

I’ll pass this feedback along to the team to consider/re-consider other options! 

[INTERNAL NOTE: FMEFORM-33819]

Hey all, thanks for the feedback here, and as Desiree shares, this has been logged into our tracking software, so we have the details above on record. However, at this point in time we will be closing this Idea as we have no plans to restore the same window as this idea states. 
I want to be specific and transparent as to why we have made this decision. We were aware of the previous idea thread and history around this before doing so, and I can assure you this removal was not done lightly, without due process in discussion, since we had seen the impact before. While the embedded Help window was convenient for some, it ultimately had very low adoption when compared to the full Help application and required a high cost to maintain. It also offered a limited and inconsistent experience compared to our full browser-based Help — with less content, no search, and reported bugs.  

For these reasons, our focus will be on improving the main Help experience, which provides the most feature and content complete experience, or building new features into workbench that assist you in understanding how transformers or other objects operate. I’ll welcome any feedback and ideas in thread as to what you’d want to see us do.

• What’s missing now, and why is that important? (the above mentioned docking ability was a great example of that) 
• What have you seen handled better in other products, and have those experiences helped you learn and engage? 

We truly appreciate your input! Your feedback guides our understanding and we look forward to hearing your ideas on what would be most valuable next.

Hi ​@jennaatsafe ,

I understand your intention, but why not hear other users' opinion? I think there is no meaning of the Ideas site if you would close a posted idea before gathering users' opinion. 

I am a user of the browser based help - comfortable having it on a second screen - and haven’t used the help window within Desktop/Form for a long time, so I understand this change, but I am with Takashi that closing things in a ‘not planned’ fashion this quickly doesn’t follow the good traditions of this community, Safe or FME. It isn’t even a month old.  

N.B. The deprecations list is something I first found today, this was the only notification of this change https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407729702029-FME-Deprecations

I appreciate that having raised this with Safe in the past explanations for idea closures after longer periods are now being given - thank you for that and we know not all ideas can be implemented - but the open collection and discussion of ideas on here needs to continue be they from a hall-of-famer like Takashi or someone who first heard of FME last week.

That all said, the idea still exists, so while I don’t use it much nowadays here’s my 2c for the traditional help window.  Keeping workflow dev above supportive tools such as data preview, help, feature type connections, history, AI Assist dockable within the Form GUI provides a very supportive and tidy developer experience and flow.  If robbed of a second or third screen it also avoids the issue of the browser help window getting in the way (not even sure if that one can be resized).  It never needed a search because it was most often related to the transformer you had clicked on with the help window automatically switching to it - fewer clicks good (and yes I see that something very similar now links to the browser version so that is good news).  Could a light level of functionality be restored here for 2025.2?