I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what is the best option for making an iPhone tutorial for my elderly father, who has just decided to scrap his old flip phone and enter the marvellous world of smartphones.

He's quite good at it so far, but liable to lose his way when he taps something he didn't mean to tap, or when his tap turns into a long press.

I'll be making this tutorial on Slackware, but feel free to make Windows suggestions if you think one might be best.

I think a printed copy would be best, though I'm open to some kind of presentation or video tutorial, which he would have to watch on an Android tablet, since his iPhone is quite small and in any case I'd like him to practise as he watches or reads.

I have done all the screenshots I think I'll need on the phone itself.

The main thing is to teach him the Phone app, Contacts, SMS messaging, email, the basic gestures, and troubleshooting. Adding callouts to the phone screenshots are a must, preferably numbered incrementally the way the Flameshot screenshot utility can do them.

I've tried LibreOffice Impress, Writer, Markdown, Apple Pages, and I feel that they all fall a bit short.

I suspect there must be software specifically for this but searching just isn't throwing it up for me.

Ideas?

Have you tried a web search? There are many iPhone tutorials on the net; some of them may well be worthwhile.

At the very least, they might give you some tips about how to structure it.

Also to consider. Since he has an android tablet an android phone is not much different and would be relatively easy to learn.

Why the decision to go iphone instead of android that he was already familiar with?

I am not incapable of learning, but when a friend asks for help with an iphone I get lost since they are so different than android.

The biggest thing for him to learn is how to back out of everything (when he makes a mistake), close what he does not want, and start over.

Yes, but searches aren't turning up quite what I have in mind.

Structuring the tutorial isn't really the problem. Finding software that is specifically designed for tutorials is. But I haven't had to do this before, so perhaps I'm just over-thinking it. Perhaps a Writer document is good enough.

Well, some years ago I bought every phone you could think of, to see which one my mother could use. iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows. It turned out she just couldn't use any, and since then she has developed dementia, so I gave the iPhone to my father -- the others have since been sold. I myself switched from Android to iPhone in 2018 and would never go back to Android now. Besides, his Android tablet has no SIM, so I wouldn't be able to teach him about the Phone part, which is his biggest concern -- getting stuck in town and unable to work out how to get back to his contacts list, or to the Dialpad.

The apple store offers free classes for that, they usually tell you about that when you buy your iphone, or at least used to. Maybe call them up and find the schedule and take your Dad to one of those, you already paid for it.

If it were I, I'd probably go with an LO writer document. The challenge would come in designing the illustrations. I'd probably do them in Kolourpaint. I find it friendlier than the GIMP for embedding text boxes and the like.

Back in the olden days, when I was a young 'un, I used to write training documents in MSWord (I worked in an MS shop) and I did the illustrations in MS Paint. (I got quite good in using Paint.) Kolourpaint is a lot more versatile than MS Paint for adding captions and text boxes and the like.

Just a few thoughts.

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My tip - teach your Dad how to use Safari to do a web search for "iphone <subject>".

That saved my work supplied iPhone from catastrophic collision with a brick wall.

Just another thought. Many android tablets are capable of having cellular service and double as phones. Have you considered that? He would only need one device that way and it would have the larger screen he is used to.

Thanks for that info. Not sure they do it here in Ireland. But anyway, I bought my iPhones and iPad secondhand.

There was a woman who gave classes before this Covid thing broke out, but she hasn't been allowed to do anything since March 2020.

I understand the frustration. It took me a while to get used to the iPhone after using nothing but Android for a few years. Really couldn't switch back now though.

Teaching him how to use the web is certainly next on the list after he gets the basics right -- I think he needs to be able to call numbers and send SMS blindfolded so that if he's stuck somewhere he won't need to Google anything. At the moment when he's trying to use the web he's inclined to tap links and long-press on links and everything else you can think of, so I'm just trying to keep him away from all these goodies until he has the basics of communication learned. At 81, and my mother with dementia at 77, he needs to master making calls and sending messages first.

I don't understand this. His tablet has no SIM slot. Are you saying these Android tablets can still be used to make cellular calls? Wouldn't he at least need WiFi, which is far from ubiquitous here in rural Ireland?

I think a tablet would be too big for him anyway. He just wants to pop a small phone into his shirt pocket. He's been using small bar phones or flip phones since the Year Dot.

Thank you everybody for taking the time to reply.

Yesterday I spent some time learning software I have never had to use -- presentation software. Often called Powerpoint, the same way photo editing is often called photoshopping these days. I simply never had to use such software, and thought of it as business-class presentation software.

But yesterday I tried Keynote on my own iPad, which is similar to Powerpoint and LibreOffice Impress. It fits very neatly into what I had in mind, but articulated quite badly, in my first post.

I can break up a tutorial into multiple slides, covering the basics -- buttons, gestures, calls, SMS, address book, and -- most importantly -- how to get yourself out of a mess you made by tapping everything you see on screen!

Each slide can have a simple iPhone screenshot or graphic, together with a short instruction. And I can add callouts.

I considered LibreOffice but a big advantage of Keynote is that I can create the tutorial on my iPad and simply share it to his iPhone, and even remote control the slideshow from my own iPhone or iPad. I can also export to HTML, PDF or Powerpoint, if I need to.

So far this very much satisfies my needs. As I say, presentation software is new to me, so mea culpa for not thinking of it earlier.

I'll get on with this over the next couple of days because he's liable to throw the phone against a wall himself if he can't get the hang of the basics. That would be a retrograde step because the older flip phones and bar phones don't seem to have the same call quality at all now, which is one of the reasons he decided to try the iPhone in the first place.

Thank you again everybody for your help. All ideas noted, and taken on board for future reference.

Not all android tablets, but some have dual function with the sim and cellular connection.