Parts of Help are missing

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paul - 16 Dec 2003 21:02 GMT

When I look at Help for Excel or Word, I get a basic topic
discussion, but "See Also", "Example" and similar links
are missing; they are replaced with small squares with a
dot in the center; clicking them does nothing. Clicking
the "Properties" of the little boxes produces a property
display but the relevant information is described as "Not
Available". Our office help staff re-installed Office
2000, but the problem persists. They did not uninstall the
problem version, but instead renamed the base folder.

Any ideas??

TIA
Paul

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Kim Mitchell - 24 Dec 2003 11:03 GMT

When you reinstalled Excel, did you do a custom install? Standard
installation, even full installation, does not include all the help files.
I had not heard of your specific problem before, but you might try a custom
installation. Display all the sub-options and make sure that all help files
are included.

Kim

> When I look at Help for Excel or Word, I get a basic topic
> discussion, but "See Also", "Example" and similar links
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> TIA
> Paul

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Pete Lees - 24 Dec 2003 21:11 GMT

Paul,

> When I look at Help for Excel or Word, I get a basic topic
> discussion, but "See Also", "Example" and similar links
> are missing; they are replaced with small squares with a
> dot in the center; clicking them does nothing.

The chances are that the registry entries for the HTML Help ActiveX
control are broken on your system. This control provides the
navigation facilities in the help files, and a number of the security
patches for Internet Explorer that Microsoft has released this year
are known to break it.

The problem is described in Knowledge Base article 822989 and, in most
cases, installing Critical Update 811630 should sort it out.

822989: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=822989
811630: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811630

The exception to this is Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 installed.
In this case you must unregister the control and then re-register it,
by running the following two commands from a command prompt:

regsvr32 /u <drive>:\winnt\system32\hhctrl.ocx
regsvr32 <drive>:\winnt\system32\hhctrl.ocx

--
Pete (Microsoft Help MVP)

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