Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Creating HTML Help Topics

The top-level steps for using HTML Help Workshop to create a Help system are as follows:

• Create a Help project file (.hhp) to manage your topics, art, contents (.hhc), index (.hhk), and other source files, and to define the on-screen appearance of your Help system.
  
  
• Author Help topic files in HTML. If you want to use the same styles as Microsoft Office Help topics, use the Office.css cascading style sheet file in the ODETools\V9\Samples\OPG\Samples\CH13\Help Source subfolder on the Office 2000 Developer CD-ROM.
  
  
• Create a table of contents file for easy navigation to Help topics. (Optional)
  
  
• Create an index file for indexing Help topics. (Optional)
  
  
• Create window definitions to define each kind of window in which you want to display Help information. (Optional if you only want to use the default HTML Help Viewer window)
  
  
• Define and assign information types for custom grouping of topics for different audiences, such as beginning or advanced users, or to display different sets of topics for different versions or installations of your solution. (Optional)
  
  
• Compile your Help file. (Optional if you are using the HTML Help ActiveX control or the HTML Help Java applet from a Web site)

For detailed information about each of these steps, see the Help index in HTML Help Workshop.