Adding Help to Your Custom Application

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Adding online Help to your Microsoft® Office XP application can reduce the amount of time required to train and support users of your applications. By using the tools provided with Microsoft HTML Help Workshop or your favorite HTML editor, you can author topics for a Help system by using the same tools and technologies used to create Web pages — including hyperlinks, ActiveX controls, scripting, and Dynamic HTML (DHTML) support. You can then compile your topics into a single file and display them by using the same viewer that is used to display Help in Office.

By using standard properties and methods, you can integrate Help topics and context-sensitive Help into your application's custom dialog boxes, error messages, and forms. If you want even more control over how HTML Help is displayed and integrated into your application, you can work directly with HtmlHelp application programming interface (API) calls from your Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.

You can also use the navigation functionality of the HTML Help ActiveX control, such as a hierarchical table of contents or an index, on Web pages independently of using the HTML Help Viewer.

If you purchased Microsoft Office XP Developer or the Microsoft Office XP Resource Kit, you can use the Answer Wizard Software Development Kit (SDK) to integrate your own Help topics with those returned to users by the Microsoft Office Assistant.

In This Section

  • Developing Office Developer Applications
    Microsoft® Office XP Developer provides the productivity tools professional developers must have to build applications faster, integration tools to make their applications work seamlessly with data and the Web, and management tools to simplify deploying and managing the applications they build with Microsoft Office.
  • Designing Applications
    Understand how planning a good effective design can mean delivering the application that customers need.
  • Developing Applications with Microsoft Office Developer
    Projects are the building blocks of an Office Developer application. If a project is a building block for an application, then an application is the foundation.
  • Debugging and Error Handling
    All code contains errors of one kind or another, and how you deal with errors might be the most important part of a well-designed application.
  • Deploying Your Application
    How you choose to deploy the application depends largely on what type of application you have created.