Customize the Help Viewer

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Microsoft Corporation

Updated June 10, 1999

If you are planning to distribute your help files with a program (instead of on a Web site), you can use HTML Help Workshop to customize the Help Viewer. The Help Viewer is a window with three panes that help topics automatically appear in.

You can change the Help Viewer's size, position, background color, and other attributes. You can make changes to just one of the panes, or all of them. You can also have the Navigation pane automatically hide when a user clicks outside the viewer.

You can add a Help Favorites tab to the Navigation pane. If you are shipping a large collection of help files, you may want to add the Advanced Full-Text Search features to the Search tab.

Another way to customize your Help Viewer is to add secondary windows to it. A secondary window is a custom window that help topics can be assigned to appear in. You have to create a secondary window and define its various display features before you can specify which topics to display in it.

Note

• You can also download Help Viewer topics, which contain basic information about how to use the viewer, from the Web and include them in your help system.