Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

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. You can also display Help from a form's command bar by adding a toolbar button or menu item that displays a Help topic. In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, you can display Help by using the Toolbox to insert a Help button in the document.

The method you use to implement context-sensitive Help in forms is very similar across all Office applications. Although the methods used for UserForms and Access forms differ slightly, essentially you specify property settings to identify the Help file that contains context-sensitive Help and then specify the context ID of the context-sensitive Help topic to display for each control.

The method you use to implement a Help button on a form or document depends on which Office application is hosting the form or document. In all cases, you run code triggered by the Click event of the Help command button, but the method used to call the Help topic differs depending on the application. In Excel and PowerPoint, you can use the Help method of the Application object to display a custom Help topic. In Word, the Help method of the Application object allows you to display only built-in Help, and Access has no such method. For this reason, implementing a Help button in both Word and Access requires you to use an API call to the HTML Help or WinHelp engine to display the Help topic. If you prefer to use the same method for displaying Help topics regardless of the application (for example, if you want to create code that will run in all four applications), you must use an API call to the Help engine.