Adding Help to Your Office Application

  • Article

This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release.

To provide Help for an application, a developer must create Help files, and then provide function calls to these files for each form that requires Help.

In This Section

  • Displaying Help Topics
    You can display Help topics to assist users of your Office applications several different ways.
  • Maintaining Backward Compatibility with Office 97/2000 Applications
    If your application needs to maintain backward compatibility with Office 97 and Office 2000 applications, you should supply all Help authored and compiled as WinHelp 4.0 files by using Microsoft Help Workshop or some other WinHelp 4.0 authoring tool.
  • The Kinds of Help You Can Use
    You can create context-sensitive Help for dialog boxes created by using UserForms or Access forms. You can also create context-sensitive Help for command bar controls.
  • Creating a Help File to Use with an Office Application
    Office XP applications can display standard Help topics authored and compiled by using either HTML Help (.chm) or WinHelp 4.0 (.hlp). Context-sensitive Help for Office XP applications must be authored by using WinHelp 4.0.
  • Specifying the Path to Your Application's Help File
    To display Help for your application, you must specify the path to the Help file that contains the topics you want to display.
  • Displaying Help in Forms and Documents
    In UserForms and Access forms, you can display context-sensitive Help for interface elements and you can display standard Help topics from a Help button on the form.
  • Displaying Help from Command Bars
    You can display both context-sensitive Help for custom command bar controls, and call a standard Help topic when a user clicks a toolbar button or menu item.
  • Using the Office Assistant to Display Help
    You can use the Office Assistant to display a balloon that allows users to access custom Help topics.
  • Displaying Help from VBA Code
    There are two ways to display a custom Help topic from code. In Excel and PowerPoint, you can use the Help method of the Application object, but in Word and Access you must use an API call to HTML Help or to WinHelp to display the Help topic.