Working with the Office Assistant

You can use the Office Assistant to animate characters that interact with your users, provide context-sensitive help, highlight parts of your user interface, collect information from users, or otherwise provide a "social" interface to your application that many users find interesting and fun to use. The Office Assistant character is drawn onscreen without an enclosing window that can interact with other elements of the application interface, pointing out controls or directing the user's attention to specific sections of a document.

You use the objects, methods, and properties of the Assistant object to programmatically control the Office Assistant, the Office Assistant balloon, and all the items inside the balloon.

In This Section

• Microsoft Agent ActiveX Control vs. the Office Assistant
  Learn when to use features of the Agent that are available only through the control.
• Programming the Office Assistant
  Make the Assistant visible, move it to different locations on the screen, specify the animation you want to run, and display Assistant balloons containing text and controls.
• Working with Balloon Objects
  Use the Office Assistant Balloon object to enables the Assistant to communicate with and get feedback from users.
• Using Balloon Controls
  Understand how to use Balloon controls.
• Modeless Balloons and the Callback Property
  Create a modeless balloon, and set its Callback property.

Related Sections

• Working with Shared Office Components
  Search for files, use the Office Assistant, manipulate command bars, read and write document properties, read and write script, and hook add-ins to your Microsoft® Office application using a set of shared objects available in all Office applications.
• Referencing Shared Office Components
  Return a reference to a shared component object by using the appropriate properties.
• Working with the FileSearch Object
  Programmatically access the functionality of the Office File Open dialog box.
• Working with Command Bars
  Write code to manipulate command bars that can be used in any Microsoft® Office application or custom application you develop.
• Working with Document Properties
  Use document properties to create, maintain, and track information about a Microsoft® Office document.
• Working with Scripts
  Access script, or insert script into a cell or range in a Microsoft® Excel worksheet, a Microsoft® PowerPoint® slide, a Microsoft® Word document, or Word Selection object.