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. If you have the Answer Wizard SDK, you can also integrate your custom Help topics with the built-in Help topics provided with Office.

In This Section

• Displaying Help Topics from an Office Assistant Balloon
  You can use the Assistant to display a balloon containing buttons and labels that users can click to open custom Help topics.
• Using the Assistant with Access Run-Time Applications
  If you are creating an Access run-time application and installing it on a computer that does not have Office installed, the Assistant object is not available.
• Creating an Answer Wizard Index to Display Custom Help Topics from the Office Assistant
  If you purchased Office XP Developer or the Microsoft Office XP Resource Kit, you can use the Microsoft Answer Wizard Builder available with the Answer Wizard SDK to create a custom Answer Wizard index with references to your custom Help topics.

Related Sections

• Adding Help to Your Office Application
  Adding online Help to your Microsoft Office application can reduce the amount of time required to train and support users of your applications.
• 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 must 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 three kinds of Help for your Office applications.
• 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).
• 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 context-sensitive Help for custom command bar controls and call a standard Help topic when a user clicks a toolbar button or menu item.
• 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.