Creating Help File in Visual Basic 6.0

We can create Help File in MS Word as well as in HTML. Here I would like to describe how to create a Help File for VB using MS Word.

First of all open a new document in MS Word. You can give a title for this document. Create some necessary topic on which you want to provide help to the client. Put any ID numbers along with the help topics without keeping any space. Make all the topics double underlined and hide the IDs.

Give a page break and write the description of help topic 1 and give another page break and write the help description for topic 2 and so on for all help topics.

Keep the mouse cursor at the beginning of the topic description and from the insert menu select reference and add footnote for all the topics description one by one and the footnote number should be the same as the ID number that we have given along with the topic name.

The custom mark for the footnote should be # symbol.

The MS Word page will look like this.

Put a reference for the first topic also.

Save the document in a Rich Text Format.

You should have Microsoft Help Workshop installed in your machine. If you don’t have it, just download hcw.exe from internet and install the same.

Open start --> Microsoft Help Workshop --> Help Workshop

File --> New --> Help Project --> OK --> Enter a Project Name (for a new help project) --> OK.

Click on Files --> Add --> Browse the location of Rich Text File that we have saved before.

Click on Map --> Enter the Topic Id (we have used in .rtf file) and put Numeric value for the same that we will use in future.

Now click on “Save and Compile” button.

Our Help File has been created where we had saved the Help Project.

We need to copy the Help file from that location and paste into the VB Project location in which Project we want to add this Help File.

In order to make this Help file available in our visual basic project, we can go to Project menu and Project Properties. Then browse the location of help file and put the numeric id of the main topic --> OK.

Run the project and press F1 to invoke the help window.