Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Working with the Office Assistant

You can use the Office Assistant to animate characters that interact with your users, provide context-sensitive help, highlight parts of your user interface, collect information from users, or otherwise provide a "social" interface to your application that many users find interesting and fun to use. The Office Assistant character is drawn onscreen without an enclosing window and can interact with other elements of the application interface, pointing out controls or directing the user's attention to specific sections of a document.

Note   The Office Assistant is not available in Microsoft FrontPage.

You use the objects, methods, and properties of the Assistant object to programmatically control the Office Assistant, the Office Assistant balloon, and all the items inside the balloon.