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I use Excel rather infrequently but when I do it's for something complicated, I could not do anything in Excel without F1 help. Just Excel.

My recollection is that help on visual studio and the old SQL server tool used to be excellent until they moved it online.

Then it became uselessly slow.

Yep. I always installed the documentation CD and loved having fast access to API docs. But arguably Google is still faster.

Way back in the day, the help documentation shipped with MSDOS really helped me out. IIRC it had a colored text-graphical interface that let you look at all the commands and what they could do.

Really helped out a young kid figure out how to write autoexec.bat/config.sys files so that his games could run. Being able to write menus so I could customize my setup for each game was so amazing.

With the advent of the internet the quality of on-system help documentation has stagnated.

'stagnates'. ha. what an euphemism.