Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide   

The HTML Help Viewer

The HTML Help Viewer is the default display method for all compiled HTML Help files and is used to display Help topics in Office 2000 applications. The HTML Help Viewer features a three-paned window as shown in Figure 13.1.

Figure 13.1 The HTML Help Viewer

The topic pane of the HTML Help Viewer is an embedded instance of the Internet Explorer layout engine (Shdocvw.dll hosting Mshtml.dll) and can display any content supported by Internet Explorer, including Office document formats (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint). The navigation pane can include a variety of different ways of accessing Help topics, including a table of contents, an index, and a full-text search tab. The button pane contains a toolbar that by default contains the following buttons.

Button Description
Hide/Show Allows users to display or hide the navigation pane.
Back Displays the previous topic.
Print Prints individual topics or groups of topics from the Contents tab.
Options Displays a menu that provides keyboard accessibility to button commands and other options.

You can use HTML Help Workshop to customize the window definition of the default HTML Help Viewer window to add Forward, Stop, Refresh, Home, and Locate (to manually synchronize a topic to the contents) buttons to the button pane. You can also define up to two custom buttons to jump to URLs you specify. Figure 13.1 shows an example of a customized button pane.