Ever since I started using Access 2003, the Help system seemed to make my life worse rather than better but like any good Access programmer, I just struggled on. So when Peter and I compiled the list of suggestions for the next version of Access that featured in the January edition of Smart Access, I realized that it wasn’t just me that thought that the Access help had gone backwards rather than forward. So I decided rather just be grumpy about my lot in life, I thought it would be a good idea to investigate the Access help system. In this article, I will discuss different aspects of Access 2003 help and other help resources so that you may better understand how to HELP yourself with Access. For the rest of you that are still developing away in earlier versions of Microsoft Access, I hope that some of the advice will assist you to get more out of your own Access help.

The Access 2003 Online Help – Use With Care

The principal design difference between Access 2003 and previous versions is that it offers an extension to the help system that can send your search words online to Microsoft.com rather than searching the help files that are shipped with Access. If you are looking for Access help to perform how it did in Access 2002 or Access 2000, then consider this “feature” carefully as the Access 2003 online search engine will increase the number of returned pages related to your search. If you simply didn’t notice this feature, test out the online results with the offline as it is my view that the additional results are more than likely to confuse you and it is going to take longer. If you are using a dial up modem this technology is really wasteful as it can deploy whenever you are connected.

To understand how this works, when Access opens an online search, it redirects the search away from the help files on your computer to Microsoft.com and comes up with a list of “Access Related” pages on the Microsoft site that are relevant to your search terms. Now when you click on the link in the Access 2003 search pane, you are directed to a page on the Microsoft Web site. What follows is a little cunning in that the results are displayed in the html help window so that it looks like local help. I am not sure what this local help Window actually achieves because the user then looses all the benefits of having a decent navigation framework to see other related pages on the Microsoft site. It is also a slower way to look at what is likely to be exactly the same help information residing on your computer.

To turn off the Access 2003 online help, open the Access 2003 help (as shown in Figure 1) and enter a search term. In this case I entered the term “Form Wizard”. Now head to the bottom of the help results where you will see that you can turn the online help off and on again. If you do turn it off, MS Access will make it easy for you to turn it back on again. Resist this unless you actually find that the online help is valuable. Another way to turn off the online help is Tools ~ Options ~General ~ Service Options ~ Online Content.


Figure 1 –An online search in Access 2003 including the option to turn off the Online Search

Understand That Your Help Is Divided In Half

An important thing to understand about Access help from Access 2000 onwards was that Microsoft has divided the Access help on into two dissociated parts. First up is the Access product help that comes whenever you use the help resources that come when you are working with anything that isn’t in the Access VBA Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Generally this help is littered with pages that aren’t all that handy to any skill level of and if you are contemplating any trying to find any programming information, please switch to the VBA IDE before entering your search phrases. Hot keys to move quickly to the VBA IDE help are Alt F11 or Control G. Then choose Help from the main menu using Alt H and then press the Enter key.

For those of you who yearn for the good old days off Access 97 help, you will be pleased to know that the Access 2003 help now includes the help for DAO which was conspicuously absent from the help in Access 2000 and 2002. In a perfect example of the lack of work the Access team did with the Access 2003 help, the table of contents for Access 2003 DAO 3.6 includes a What’s New section that highlights the great things in DAO 3.5. On the topic of DAO help, during the beta trials of Access 2003 that I suggested to the Access 2003 team that all the DAO examples should include the DAO object name in front of the references to DAO objects so that DAO and ADO would not get confused. E.g. Dim dbsExample As DAO.Database and not Dim dbsExample As Database. This obviously fell on deaf ears even though a Microsoft beta supervisor agreed that it was a good idea. It still hasn’t been fixed in the latest version of the help (see useful Resources Section at the end of article).

Open Your Access Help Files Directly For A Better Interface

On of these reason that I believe that the Access help is not so useful any more seems to be that in an effort to integrate the Access help with a fancy Task pane and online searches, the Microsoft team dropped any integration with the Table of Contents (TOC). The best way to return to the previous style of Help is to open the help files directly
(see Figure 2) but if is possible to seethe TOC by opening Help from the main menu.. to open the files directly, find the following CHM files in your Access 2003 Program Files folder in a subdirectory called 1033. Once you find the files (listed as follows), open them or even setup a shortcut so that they will always be readily available.

ACMAIN11.CHM ~ This is the main Access help file
VBAAC10.CHM ~ This is the Access VBA help
GRAPH10.CHM ~ This is the Microsoft Graph help

Once you open one of the files (see Figure 2), you will see that the help interface can also include the Table of Contents down the left hand side. Usually the TOC will synchronize with the page that you are currently viewing on the screen on the right hand side. If you cannot see the TOC, click on the book button with the arrow on it at the top left of the help window and it will display.


Figure 2 – The HMTL Help file (*.CHM) will generally synchronize the help page with the TOC

When All Else Fails – Read The Manual

When you do not know a lot about a topic and searching Access help and the internet is leading you down a lot of blind alleys; TAKE A BREATHER: A better approach in this case is to pull out a book or a relevant of Smart Access article and do some background reading on a topic. When this happens, it is good to be prepared with two or three different books at your level that you can simply pull off your shelf to help you get into a topic. When its all said and done, three books at $40 each is not a lot of money even if you only read three chapters from each book. The good thing about reading a book chapter or two is that you will now be armed with far more specific search terms that you can use with Access help or on an Internet search engine. Another cheaper approach is to read the relevant sections from the Access 2003 Table of Contents but you can get a little lazy reading from a screen in my view.

Training Sessions

One of the things that will crop up when you are searching the Access 2003 online help is training sessions on the Microsoft site. Whilst these are not for everyone, there maybe a few of you may find it good to sit back and listen to a talk on a particular Access topic for free. This innovation is new to Access 2003 but is available to all.

Searching For Errors

One of the things that Access help isn’t very good at is what to do when an error number is encountered in the Access environment. My normal approach is first to try and coax the correct error number and message from the user. Once armed with this, I will type the message in full with the error number into Google. The feature that makes Google particularly adept at helping out with error messages is that you can quickly switch to the Google Groups view if the html searching doesn’t come up with the goods in the first 10 or 20 results.

Building Your Own Knowledge Base

If have missed the terrific battle that is taking place in desktop searching tools, I highly commend that you arm yourself with a desktop searching tool so that you can become a more proficient knowledge based warrior. Desktop searching tools that have been getting good press can be downloaded free from Copernic, Google and Microsoft even thought the latter two were in beta mode at the time I was writing this article. What you can do when you have these tools is to save the HTML pages and other resources that you come across into a knowledge based folder on your desktop. This way when you actually need the information, a quick search of your desktop will reveal the HTML or other materials that have been saved in your knowledge based folder. One other way to accumulate knowledge based material is to sign up for Access newsletters with good content. This way when you search using your desktop search tool, the newsletters will be found in your emails will provide valuable gateways to the material on the internet that best suits your Access searches.

Searching For Help At Microsoft.Com

If you think that you would like to get the most out the Access help online but do not want to turn on the Access online help, one good place to head to at the Microsoft site is http://support.microsoft.com. Once you are there, look for the Select a Product link and Choose Office Access 2003. Bookmark this page so that you can quickly return to it in your browser. Now click on the link that says Search (KB).

Useful Further Reading and Resources

Microsoft released a new version of the VBA help for Access 2003 (VBAAC10.CHM) in late 2004. It can be downloaded from the following location and will replace the help file that you have now.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/downloads/vba/

Using Microsoft Help in your own solutions
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/office/2000/all/solution/en-us/part2/ch13.mspx

Woody’s Office Watch has a good series on Desktop Searching in late 2004.
http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archives.asp

Summing Up – A Message For Microsoft

What I would like to do with this summation is to put up a plea to the Microsoft staff and Access MVP’s that have some influence on the shape of Access. Here is my summation of what needs to be done to the Access help to make it a more valuable resource for both the Professional developer and the Novice user .

As users of the Help, we are after an answer not a huge list of possible pages that don’t seemed to be ranked very well. We need a list that is dependant on the level of expertise of the person asking the question. If the person is a professional developer, we want answers from either the VBA help or the normal Access help. We don’t want silly boundaries between different parts of the product. If the person using the product is a beginner then they don’t need to see lots of help on things such as Pivot tables and XML exports at the top of the list, just the basics that explain what to do. A very simple extension to the help could easily allow the user to enter their own level of expertise or interest, be it beginner, moderate Access developer or Access professional. Also the number of hits that are returned from the Access Help are way too big and they rarely seem to reflect the answer that you are expecting, well not in the first few results. Here are some other suggestions that could also make a difference.

The help will return better results if the terms are spelt correctly, so why doesn’t the help check it for us. This would be particularly using for special words peculiar to VBA or Access. Google always offers a correct spelling as an option at the top of the search results so that can be used with just one click.

Why not show us the pages that we have already looked at recently in a different colour just like a used hyperlink. I really don’t like bumping into a page that I have already read.

Bring back the Index words part of the Access help. When I read about Index words a few years ago, Microsoft was happy to promote that these could improve the use of help files by 20%. Now they have simple been removed altogether from the help interface.

If you are not using an Access Project, no results should come from this help. The opposite should apply for people using Access projects where the help is only related to MDB files.

Simply reduce the number of pages in the Access help. Whilst it is terrific that a page is small and easy to read, this has led to a very large resource with an awful lot of pages that say a whole lot about nothing. For one, simply including the examples on the same page as the content would probably reduce the number of pages by 30%.

If there is someway that the help usage could be monitored across large numbers of users, then the help could be ranked in such a way that the better results tend to rise to the top.

In conclusion, the help file is important to everyone that uses Access, so beloved Microsoft Team, please put lots of good R&D into its design. When you think you have come up with a new system, find someway of bulk testing any changes with the users of the product and make sure that the help is suited to the needs of all Access users.

Author Bio.

Garry Robinson runs GR-FX Pty Limited, a company based in Sydney, Australia. If you want to keep up to date with the his latest postings on Access Issues, visit his companies popular web site at http://www.vb123.com/ or sign up for his Access email newsletter by sending a blank email to tips@vb123.com The web site features many Access resource sand software that are used by more than 10,000 readers a month. To find out about Garry’s book which is called “Real World Microsoft Access Database Protection and Security”, point your browser to http://www.vb123.com/map/. You can find Garry’s contact details at … www.gr-fx.com

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