Thank you for your interest in the Windows IT professional documentation! We appreciate your feedback, edits, and additions to our docs. This page covers the basic steps for editing our technical documentation.
All contributors who are not a Microsoft employee must sign a Microsoft Contribution Licensing Agreement (CLA) before editing any Microsoft repositories. If you've already edited within Microsoft repositories in the past, congratulations! You've already completed this step.
We've tried to make editing an existing, public file as simple as possible.
Note
At this time, only the English (en-us) content is available for editing.
To edit a topic
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Go to the page on docs.microsoft.com that you want to update, and then click Edit.
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Log into (or sign up for) a GitHub account.
You must have a GitHub account to get to the page that lets you edit a topic.
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Click the Pencil icon (in the red box) to edit the content.
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Using Markdown language, make your changes to the topic. For info about how to edit content using Markdown, see:
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If you're linked to the Microsoft organization in GitHub: Windows authoring guide
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If you're external to Microsoft: Mastering Markdown
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Make your suggested change, and then click Preview Changes to make sure it looks correct.
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When you’re done editing the topic, scroll to the bottom of the page, and then click Propose file change to create a fork in your personal GitHub account.
The Comparing changes screen appears to see what the changes are between your fork and the original content.
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On the Comparing changes screen, you’ll see if there are any problems with the file you’re checking in.
If there are no problems, you’ll see the message, Able to merge.
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Click Create pull request.
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Enter a title and description to give the approver the appropriate context about what’s in the request.
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Scroll to the bottom of the page, making sure that only your changed files are in this pull request. Otherwise, you could overwrite changes from other people.
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Click Create pull request again to actually submit the pull request.
The pull request is sent to the writer of the topic and your edits are reviewed. If your request is accepted, updates are published to one of the following places:
To make substantial changes to an existing article, add or change images, or contribute a new article, you will need to create a local clone of the content. For info about creating a fork or clone, see the GitHub help topic, Fork a Repo.
Fork the official repo into your personal GitHub account, and then clone the fork down to your local device. Work locally, then push your changes back into your fork. Then open a pull request back to the master branch of the official repo.
If you just want to provide feedback rather than directly modifying actual documentation pages, you can create an issue in the repository.
At the top of a topic page you'll see an Issues tab. Click the tab and then click the New issue button.
Be sure to include the topic title and the URL for the page you're submitting the issue for, if that page is different from the page you launched the New issue dialog from.
You can use your favorite text editor to edit Markdown. We recommend Visual Studio Code, a free lightweight open source editor from Microsoft.
You can learn the basics of Markdown in just a few minutes. To get started, check out Mastering Markdown.