Basic Working Procedures > Creating Projects > Creating an empty new project

When you create a new project Help & Manual automatically generates a table of contents (TOC) with a small set of topics that you can use as a starting-point.

1.	Click on the Application Button and select New to display the Create New Help Project wizard:

Select the first option, Create a new help project, then click on Next.

2.	In the next screen you choose the project save format and specify the project save location, the project filename ,the project title and the language settings:

Save format:
The Standard version of the program can only save in Compressed ZIP Archive mode (single .hmxz project file). If you have the Professional version you can deselect this option to save in uncompressed XML format (an .hmxp project file and separate XML files for all topics and settings, required for multi-user editing). You must save to an empty folder when you choose the uncompressed format.

Enter a title for your help project and select your help project language and character set. If your help project is in English or any ordinary western European language leave these options set to English (United States) and ANSI_CHARSET. See International languages setup for details on settings for other languages. Then click on Next.

3.	In the Table of Contents screen the wizard then displays a small set of standard topics that you can now edit and add to:

You can edit, delete and add topics if you want to. Don't worry about getting everything right now – you can change everything later very easily.

Click OK to create and open your new project. All the topics whose titles you entered in the previous step will automatically be created.

Your project represents a great deal of work, time and creativity and it is probably worth a lot of money. We urgently advise you to make regular backups, preferably on an external drive, and keep them in a safe place. Help & Manual is very secure and takes great care to protect your data but Windows can crash, hard drives can fail, the power can go off and viruses can strike, so it is better to be safe than sorry.

Automatic backups:

You can set Help & Manual to make automatic backups of your project file at regular intervals. Go to View > Program Options > General and select the option Automatically back up project every xx minutes. This will automatically create a backup copy of your project with the extension .hmxz~~ in your project directory at the specified intervals (to make these files readable just rename them to .hmxz removing the two tilde characters).