How to Create, Insert and Edit User-Defined Variables in RoboHelp

User-defined variables are one of the many wonderful features of Adobe RoboHelp.

When you first launch RoboHelp, the STARTER screen offers many types of help projects to create:

(Click on images to enlarge them)

All these project types offer a User Defined Variables pod. Some of these pods come with pre-defined default user-defined variables; and others don’t. Here are some examples:
Policies and Procedures:

Knowledge Base:

Application Help:

E-Learning:

To create your own user-defined variable:
1) Click the Create New User-Defined Variable button…

2) … and display the New Variable dialog box:

3) Enter a Variable Name and a Variable Value. For example, “DocName” and “Principle Document”“.
4) To enter this variable in any topic, click your cursor where you want to enter the variable.
5) Then select Insert > User Defined Variable from the main menu to display the Fields and Variables dialog box:

6) Select the user-defined variable you like and click the OK button to insert it into the help topic.

The value of the variable will display in the topic:

Here is the beauty of the RoboHelp user-defined variables:

You can insert the same variable in more topics than one. Let’s assume you’ve used the DocName variable in 50 different topics. What happens if the name of the document changes? Simple: you just edit it only once in the User Defined Variables pod and save, and bingo!  The value is updated accordingly in all 50 topics at once!

To edit the value of a RoboHelp user-defined variable:

1) Right-click the variable in the User Defined Variables pod to display the pop-up menu.
2) Select Edit to display the User Defined Variable Properties dialog box:

3) Change the Variable Value and click OK to update the value in all topics at once.