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Maintaining Backward Compatibility with Office 97/2000 Applications

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This content is no longer actively maintained.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.

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 standard properties and methods available to display Help in Office 97 applications don't support using HTML Help files to display context-sensitive Help or standard Help topics.

However, you can display standard Help topics (but not context-sensitive Help) in Office 97 applications from HTML Help files if you create a function declaration to call the HtmlHelp API directly to display the topic.

For information about creating WinHelp 4.0 files, see the Help system in Microsoft Help Workshop*.* Microsoft Help Workshop can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft Technical Support Web site at http://support.microsoft.com/download/support/mslfiles/hcwsetup.exe.

See Also

Adding Help to Your Custom Application | The Kinds of Help You Can Use | 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 | Displaying Help by Using the HtmlHelp API