Creating Your Own Help Topics

Customizing Help Content for Your Users

Microsoft Office allows you to create all sorts of custom solutions for users. But what if users want help with your custom features? Or what if you want your users to be able to look up information about using your organization’s templates or filling in your organization’s forms?

Whether you are documenting a new add-in or including topics specific to your organization, you can use Office 2000 to create your own Help content and distribute it to your users. When a user asks the Answer Wizard a question about the custom feature, the new Help content turns up in the Answer Wizard search, along with the rest of the Office 2000 Help topics.

For example, users might need assistance with a Visual Basic for Applications tool created by your IS department. If you have also created custom Help content for this feature, users can type a question in the Answer Wizard and find the answer, without knowing that they’re searching for customized Help.

Creating custom content for use with the Office Help system involves three steps:

• Creating HTML-compatible Help files

  Custom Help topics can include HTML Help files that reside on a Web site, or compressed HTML (CHM) files that you distribute to users locally or over the network.

• Creating a new Answer Wizard (AW) file

  The Microsoft Answer Wizard Builder helps you build your own AW files, which are used by the Answer Wizard to locate topics in response to users’ queries.

• Registering your custom Help files

  To make your custom Help content available to users, you copy the new AW file and Help files to each user’s computer and update each user’s Windows registry. The next time a user asks the Answer Wizard a question, your custom Help content becomes part of the answer.