About creating custom Help for a form, report, or control

There are several ways to add Help to a Microsoft Access form, report, or control. If you want to display tips that pop up over controls when you move the mouse pointer over the control, you can use the ControlTipText property. Or you might want to use the StatusBarText property to display helpful information about a form or control in the status bar. You can also create tips for new toolbar buttons that you create.

If you want to have Help for a control pop up only when you click the What's This button and then click a control, you can use a text editor or word-processing program to create a Help file. (The program must be able to save documents in Rich Text Format.) Then you can compile that Help file with Microsoft Help Workshop and attach it to a control by using the HelpFile and HelpContextID properties.

For forms and reports, you can create more extensive Help that is displayed when you press F1 by setting the HelpFile and HelpContextID properties of the form or report. For this type of Help, you can use either Microsoft Help Workshop or Microsoft HTML Help Workshop to create the Help file.

Notes  

• You can download Microsoft Help Workshop from the Microsoft Technical Support Web site.
  
  
• Microsoft HTML Help Workshop is included with Microsoft Office 2000 Developer.
  
  
• For more information about creating custom Help, see "Adding Help to Your Custom Solution" in the Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide. Learn how to obtain a copy of this book.

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