Authoring for Office 12 Help

Last update: 03-Feb-2007; Original: 23-Feb-2007
A work in progress - Rob

Introduction

Here are some notes for those who want to integrate content into Office 12 Help. Frank put me up to this :-)

About Office 12 Help

• Office 12 Online help (help located on the server) is AP Help (Assistance Platform help as used in Windows Vista Help and Office 2003 online help).
• Office 12 Offline help (help located on the local PC) is MS Help 2.x (same help system used by Technet, Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005 etc).

AP Help

The AP Help SDK is part of the Vista BDD 2007 (Business Desktop Deployment) download. AP Help is not support by Microsoft, it's for OEMs and MS in-house. Microsoft do not encourage us to use it in any shape or form (unless we are an OEM or are helping an OEM).  I see no technical problems with using AP Help except that's it is not a mature technology and not ready for prime time yet.

• Windows Vista AP Help.

MS Help 2.x

MS Help 2.x we all know about. The problem here is that the default mode for Office 12 is Online help. It's easy enough to merge content into Office12 Offline Help (so your help content appears in Office TOC, Index, Search etc), but the user may never see it because they are configured to view Online help.

Then there is the whole question about if I extend the Office GUI via the Office extensions how to I call my help? I don't know the answer.

Offline Help

All I help you with at the moment is adding content into the Office 12 offline help system. These tutorials will help you build an MS Help 2.x .HxS help files. We recommend you author H2 using FAR (plus a good HTML editor such as MS FrontPage or Adobe DreamWeaver), or use any of the excellent MS Help2 authoring systems out there. However FAR becomes essential a little latter on.

• MS H2 Collection Tutorial
• MS HELP 2.x Info

Integration is pretty straightforward using the FAR Collection Wizard. All you need to know is the target Namespace of the collection you want to integrate into.

The MS H2 tools available only deal with integrating into the Visual Studio help collection. You will need to use a tool like H2Reg which is extremely flexible and allows you to plug content into any H2 collection. Also note that H2Reg can use wild cards. So you can plug into MS.WINWORD.12.* which will plug you into whatever language version of Word help that is found installed on the target PC.

• H2Reg Home Page
• FAR Home Page

Using the FAR Collection Wizard, you simply select your source .HxS help files (created from you HTML), specify the Namespace of the target collection and it will generate the collection level files and the H2Reg registration script for you. See the following Collection Wizard paper for a walkthrough of the process.

• FAR Collection Wizard

That's all for now. I'll post more info as it comes to hand.

Kicking the Tires

I'm looking at the Office 12 H2 collections available using FAR's H2 Utilities window.
Most of these names look familiar. Last 2 items are Word help (Developer and Normal help).
All separate help systems. I see no evidence of merging modules (plug-ins) together.

What does MS Word 12 help look like?

VS DExplore it ain't. Like everything the Office team do this is a completely customized window.
Featuring our friend the IE Browser control embed in the middle to show content.
You can flip between Online/Offline mode using the bottom right button/menu.

MS Word 12 in DExplore?

Let's open  Office Word Help in DExplorer.
Press Windows+R (run dialog) then paste in "DExplore /helpcol ms-help://MS.WINWORD.12.1033".

Very simple. No Index (can click on Index tab but has no data).
The Table Of Contents is used to build Browse tables in Word help. Here is Office Help pane overlayed on same help loaded into DExplore. See the relationship between TOCs?

Here is another shot of a more complex deeper TOC. These Office viewer jump table pages are built dynamically using the MS Help TOC file. Again you can see the relationship if you study them both. Underneath it all (view source) it is all standard HTML, but remember they probably started off with AML (was called MALM) and parse or transformed that into HTML suitable for MS Help 2.

Merging H2Reg Help in Word Help

OK lets plug-in the HW.H2Reg Collection into the MS.WINWORD.12.1033 collection (Remember we are offline mode. We wont see anything interesting in Online mode).

Plug-In is easy with FAR HTML.

1. Open FAR
2. Main menu > Authoring > H2 Utils (first tab: Namespaces)
3. Select namespace "MS.WINWORD.12.1033" from the list
4. Click Namespace > Register, Plug-Ins tab
5. Click Add button and select HW.H2Reg as the child namespace. Click OK.
   (choose some other namespace if H2Reg not available)
   Note: H2Reg is a free download.

We now have H2Reg Help merged into Word Help.

Here's a snap shot with Table Of Contents open. See the Home page has top two items in the TOC ("Word" and "H2Reg Help").

Search Box Dropdown

Notice that the Search box dropdown menu allows you to flip between various online and offline help files. So this is an alternative to the simple Online/Offline selection (bottom right corner of the window). So this is how you load the Word Developer Help.

Select "Developer Reference". You will notice a slight pause as it unloads the MS.WINWORD.12.1033 help collection, and then loads the MS.WINWORD.DEV.12.1033 help collection.

Again I've plugged HW.H2Reg help thus time into MS.WINWORD.DEV.12.1033 (I had to reopen the Help Viewer to see the changes).

What do we Know about the "Microsoft Office Help Viewer"?

We can see its path and command-line in Vista Task Manager as:

    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\CLView.exe "WINWORD" "Microsoft Office Word"

    (Task manager View menu to enable showing command-line params)

• Parameter 2 is easy. It's simply the title.
  CLView.exe WINWORD KillRoy
  produces the following...

  We have changed the title of the window and first offline item in the menu.

  

• Parameter 1. Valid parameters are:

• WINWORD
• EXCEL
• MSACCESS
• ONENOTE
• OUTLOOK
• POWERPNT
• MSPUB

No evidence that we can ask the viewer to open other help collections.

to be continued...

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