is it possible to customize text in the help pane?

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Tom - 18 Dec 2006 14:02 GMT

Is it possible to customize the text in Microsoft's help pane? I tried
using the Office Assistant, but two people's computers hung and crashed
when I did that. I'm thinking maybe the help pane may be more stable.
But it looks like I'd have to do some serious code editing to make that
work. Any tips?

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Jay Freedman - 18 Dec 2006 14:29 GMT

> Is it possible to customize the text in Microsoft's help pane? I tried
> using the Office Assistant, but two people's computers hung and
> crashed when I did that. I'm thinking maybe the help pane may be more
> stable. But it looks like I'd have to do some serious code editing to
> make that work. Any tips?

I wouldn't try to customize the existing task pane for something that should
be so trivial. Programming the Assistant is this simple:

Sub ShowCustomAssistantText()
Dim wasEnabled As Boolean
Dim wasVisible As Boolean
Dim myBalloon As Balloon

With Application.Assistant
wasEnabled = .On
wasVisible = .Visible
.On = True
.Visible = True
Set myBalloon = .NewBalloon
With myBalloon
.Text = "This is custom text"
.Show
End With
Set myBalloon = Nothing
.Visible = wasVisible
.On = wasEnabled
End With
End Sub

If you still want to hack the task pane, have a look at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=288542 and especially
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/TaskPanesReference.htm. Be prepared
to find that you can't do what you want.

Signature

Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

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Tom - 18 Dec 2006 21:09 GMT

Thanks Jay. I had added the office assistant macro earlier, but ran
into a couple of difficulties. First, it seems like I can't make a list
of 7 items. I created a list with 6 and it worked fine, but when I
added one more, it gave me an error.

Second, when my office assistant did produce an error, the result was
to freeze the user's computer. I fixed them all and now they seem to
work fine. (Question: Is it possible to automatically call a different
office assistant, one other than Clippy?)

One note: I spent a while trying to figure out how to make an image the
button to click to set off a macro. After following a rather intricate
process from a certain website, I tried something different -- just
pasting the image in where I would normally write the text to be
displayed.

For example, {MACROBUTTON Overview image} where image is actually just
a little image. Turns out it works fine that way.

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Jay Freedman - 19 Dec 2006 03:18 GMT

Yes, it's possible to specify which assistant you want, with
statements like

Dim oldAssist As String
oldAssist = Application.Assistant.FileName
Application.Assistant.FileName = Application.Path & "\offcat.acs"

But any given Office installation may have all, some, or none of the
assistants installed (they're individually selectable in a custom
installation), and they may or may not be in the Application.Path
folder (which is usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11
for Office 2003, or a similar path for earlier versions). So it's best
to precede that statement with

On Error Resume Next

and do whatever error handling you need.

When you exit your macro, set the user's preferred assistant back in
place with

Application.Assistant.FileName = oldAssist

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

>Thanks Jay. I had added the office assistant macro earlier, but ran
>into a couple of difficulties. First, it seems like I can't make a list
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
>For example, {MACROBUTTON Overview image} where image is actually just
>a little image. Turns out it works fine that way.

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Tom - 19 Dec 2006 18:59 GMT

Cool, thanks for explaining that. You know, after I created the
document with all of these macro-driven help buttons, the person I
created the document for said he didn't want a document with macros.
Reason being, the user has to lower the security level to run the
macros, and I think doing so might be potentially confusing. Oh well. I
learned more about macros in the process anyway.

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