Getting Help
Mathematica comes with an extensive built-in help system. It serves as a
complete reference by including all 1,600 pages of The Mathematica Book as well as
supplemental documentation online in the Help Browser. A good place to start learning about
Mathematica from the ground up is the Tour of Mathematica found in either the
Help Browser or The Mathematica Book.
Quick Answers to Questions about Functions
If you are in doubt about a command or the arguments it requires, there are several options.
- Type the first few letters of the command, and press
CONTROL-k. Mathematica will show you a pop-up list of
possible completions.
- Press CONTROL-SHIFT-k, and Mathematica will provide a template of the
command and the optional parameters.
- Use the input palettes provided in the File ->
Palettes submenu. Simply press the correct button, and Mathematica will
paste a template of the function call into the notebook, including tab-through placeholders
for your parameters. For an example, take a look at the
Basic Calculations palette.
You can also get information about built-in functions or packages by typing
?FunctionName for basic information or ??FunctionName
for a more detailed version. If you use only partial function names, you can use the *
wildcard.
The Help Browser
One of the most appealing advantages of Mathematica is the Help Browser--a complete,
fully interactive, typeset-quality help system.
In contrast to some help systems, which give just a short overview of functions, the
Mathematica Help Browser contains all of the Mathematica documentation.
This includes:
The documentation consists entirely of fully indexed Mathematica notebooks,
so they offer the same high typesetting quality as the printed documentation. In addition,
all of the Help Browser notebooks are fully interactive, so you can execute calculations,
make changes, copy and paste, and add your own help notebooks and comments. By default,
the Help Browser discards any changes made within the Help Browser, but you can customize
your system to save the changes you want to keep.
To get to the Help Browser, either press SHIFT-F1 or
select Help Browser from the Help menu. To open the Help Browser
to a specific function, find or
type the name of the function in a notebook. Then place the cursor in or on the right of the
function name and press F1 or select Find Selected Function
from the Help menu. The Find
Selected Function option always finds the exact function name in the Help Browser. When
you press F1, the Help Browser looks only to the left of the cursor, which helps you look
for functions with similar names if the cursor is in the middle of the function name.
By default, the Help Browser searches only the Built-in Functions part of the index.
If you do not find the answer you are looking for there, click the Master Index button
and repeat the search.
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