The Kinds of Help You Can Use

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This content is no longer actively maintained.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.

You can create three kinds of Help for your Office applications:

  • Context-sensitive pop-up Help to describe your application's interface elements. (This kind of Help is sometimes referred to as What's ThisHelp.)

    You can create context-sensitive Help for dialog boxes created by using UserForms or Access forms. This type of Help is displayed either by clicking the question mark button in the title bar of a dialog box and then clicking a control, or by moving the focus to a control and then pressing SHIFT+F1. A small, borderless pop-up window appears next to the clicked control.

    You can also create context-sensitive Help for command bar controls. Context-sensitive Help for command bar controls is displayed either by pressing SHIFT+F1 and then clicking the control, or by clicking What's This? on the Help menu before clicking the control.

    **Caution   **While HTML Help does provide the ability to author and display pop-up windows for context-sensitive Help, UserForms, Access forms, and command bars in Office XP do not support using HTML Help files for context-sensitive Help. If you want to add context-sensitive Help for interface elements in your Office XP application, you must author and compile your topics as WinHelp 4.0 (.hlp) files by using Microsoft Help Workshop or some other WinHelp 4.0 authoring tool.

  • Standard Help topics that can be displayed by clicking a Help button in a dialog box or form, or by clicking a control on a command bar.

    Clicking a Help button in a dialog box or form displays a Help topic in a separate Help window. You can also associate a Help topic with the Help button displayed in dialog boxes created by using the InputBox and MsgBox functions, and you can provide Help topics for custom errors returned by using the Raise method. Similarly, you can provide a menu item or toolbar button on a command bar to display a Help topic.

  • Standard Help topics that can be displayed from the Object Browser to document the properties and methods you define in custom class modules.

See Also

Adding Help to Your Custom Application | Adding Help to Your Office Application | Creating a Help File to Use with an Office Application | Specifying the Path to Your Application's Help File | Displaying Help in Forms and Documents | Displaying Help from Command Bars | Using the Office Assistant to Display Help | Displaying Help from VBA Code