Using Help — browse and search the guides

Any of these opens it:

• Help at the bottom of the sidebar (on a phone, open the menu first).
• The ? icon in the top bar, then Browse help (windows 640 pixels wide or more). The same menu has Ask the assistant.
• A Help guide result when you use global search.

You land on How can we help?, with a few popular guides to start from.

The topic list on the left (above the guide on a phone) groups the guides under headings such as General, Users, Groups, End of year, MAT & schools, Sync (split into Microsoft & Entra, Google Workspace, Apple School Manager and Active Directory), The sync engine, Data, Account and Platform (guides for Realsmart's own platform pages). Select a guide to read it.

To search, type in Search help… (two letters or more). It looks at guide titles, summaries, keywords and the questions each guide answers, forgives typos, and understands common alternatives (for example "gsuite" for Google Workspace). The best matches come first; if nothing matches you'll see No results for "…". Clear the box to go back to the full list.

The small icon beside each guide shows its type: a play button for a How-to, a lightbulb for a Concept, a list for a Reference and a warning triangle for Troubleshooting.

A few guides are for Realsmart's own staff and are hidden from schools.

A guide shows where it sits (for example Sync › Google Workspace › …), a badge for its type (How-to, Concept, Reference or Troubleshooting) and when it was last updated. How-to guides are written as numbered steps. Links inside a guide open the other guide in Help, and Related buttons at the bottom lead to nearby guides.

Every step has its own address (it ends #step-1, #step-2 and so on), so you can share a link to one step.

If you'd rather ask than read, use Ask the assistant from the top-bar help menu or the search bar — it answers from these same guides and shows which ones it used. You can ask follow-up questions in the same conversation, such as "and for staff?", and it remembers the conversation for 12 hours or until you start a new chat. Many pages also have a small ? next to their title (Help for this page), which opens the assistant already pointed at that page's guide. See Using global search.