The Project Explorer is completely new and it allows you to access the contents of your project just as you would browse the contents of your hard disk with Windows Explorer. See the Introduction and Quick Start Tutorials sections for an introduction to the Project Explorer.

All the settings that used to be located in Project Properties are now accessed in the       Configuration section in the Project Explorer.

The File menu has now been replaced by the Application Button, which opens the Application Menu. Look for all your basic file, input and output functions here. Remember its name, this is one of the most important controls in the new interface and it is referred to constantly in the help.

The Quick Access Toolbar next to the Application Button navigates in your editing history like a browser and provides direct access to the most frequently-used functions. Configure it with the drop-down menu at its right-hand end.

See The User Interface for more details.

This is now called Program Options – you can access it both in the Application Menu and in the View tab.

These are now in the Quick Access Toolbar next to the Application Button and they are blue instead of green.

The menus have been replaced by tabs. You will find your editing and text formatting tools in the Write tab. The tools that used to be located in the Insert menu are also located there.

The editor tabs are still there, they're now below the main editor window instead of above it.

The Index tab has been replaced by the new Index Tool, which you can access in the Project menu.

This section no longer exists. Instead, you have the Table of Contents section with all your TOC entries and the Project Files section where all your topic files are stored. The TOC entries are only links to your topic files.

You can still create topics without TOC entries. To do this you just create a new topic in the Topic Files section instead of in the Table of Contents section.

We now refer to generating your output as "publishing". The old term "compile" is a hangover from the time when Help & Manual only produced Winhelp and HTML Help files, which are generated with the Microsoft help compilers. Help & Manual is now a multi-format tool for technical writers and we felt that the term "publishing" was more appropriate. We still refer to compiling occasionally, but only when we are really talking about the Microsoft help compilers.

The Baggage Files section is now located in Project Files > Baggage Files in the Project Explorer.

The mechanisms for undocking and redocking Help & Manual components have changed. You can now undock and redock just by double-clicking on a window title bar. You can't undock components of the Ribbon interface or the Editor window. However, you can change the position of the tab by dragging it. See Explorer Tips for more details.

You can also undock and redock windows by dragging them to the borders of the Editor window – you can dock components to any side of the editor: top, bottom, left or right.

Help windows are now only relevant for HTML Help (CHM) and Winhelp (HLP). It is no longer possible or necessary to associate a help window definition with individual topics. Help window definitions are now only used for defining the appearance and behavior of the HTML Help and Winhelp help viewers and for displaying topics in external windows with hyperlinks.

To configure the help viewers you just need to edit the definition of the Main help window in Configuration > Common Properties > Help Windows.

Displaying topics in external windows is now achieved exclusively with hyperlinks. You define an additional help window type and then select the help window type in the Insert Hyperlink dialog when you create the hyperlink. It is no longer possible to define a topic that automatically opens in an external window when it is selected in the TOC (this never made sense anyway).

These are no longer defined by the help windows except for the obsolete Winhelp format. Background colors for all HTML-based output formats are now defined in the HTML page template which you can find in Configuration > HTML Topic Page Templates.

This is no longer needed in Help & Manual 5 because there is no longer any internal database that needs to be reorganized. If you save in the uncompressed XML format everything is saved in plain-text files and there is nothing hidden that needs to be repaired. The single-file HMXZ format is really just a ZIP archive and if it ever needs repair you can fix it with any of a large number of ZIP repair and recovery tools – just change the file extension to .zip to perform the repair, then change it back to .hmxz to be able to open it in Help & Manual.