Display the Office Assistant by clicking the Microsoft Access Help button on the toolbar. You can type your questions or a word to describe the topic you want information on and press Enter or click the Search button.
Type in the following: How do I get started? And then click the Search button.
Next, you select one of the topics suggested by the Office Assistant to open the help window. Click Get Started with Microsoft Access 2000 option. Note: Notice the See More...option at the bottom of the list, this is available when there are more matches than will fit in one dialog box.
The Microsoft Access Help Window displays help on the topic you selected. Blue underlined topics are links to more help, and you can click them to view another page of Help. Click the link “Using a database for the first time.”
Like the previous page, this page also contains a list of topics--in the Help system you can click an underlined topic to see another page of help. Click the Show button (the first button on the toolbar) to see another pane of the Help window that gives you some additional ways to find the help you need.
The Help window now has two panes: the right pane contains the Help text, and the left pane contains three tabs to enable you to navigate to the Help topic you need. To display the single pane, you can click the Show button again – it is now called the Hide button.
The first tab (the one seen here) is the Contents tab. The Contents tab contains items like you might see in a book’s table of contents. This table of contents is hierarchical, and to see subtopics, you double-click a topic with a book in front of it, which I will call a chapter. Try double-clicking the chapter, “Creating and Working with Databases.”
When you double-click a Help chapter the chapter expands to show you subchapters and Help topics. Subchapters appear with a book in front of them andlike chapters they can be opened with a double-click.
Help topics appear with a question mark icon in front of them, click a topic to see the text of the topic in the right pane. Click “About designing a database” to see the help text.
In addition to the Contents tab there are two other tabs in the left pane that can help you find the information you need.
The Answer Wizard draws on the same technology as the Office Assistant--it allows you to ask a question and lists Help topics that may provide the answer.
The Index tab allows you to search for a particular word by typing in a keyword. I find this is the Help feature I use the most. Click the Index tab.
Use the Index tab to find help on a particular topic. For instance, if you want to know more about data, you can type data into the Type keywords box--try it, then click Search.
When you search for a keyword, the Help system shows you the first Help topic it finds. And at the bottom of the left pane it shows a list of all the topics it found (the scroll buttons let you see all the topics--but not in this simulation). You can display a topic from the
Choose a topic box by clicking it. Let’s return briefly to some of the other features of the Help window. The Help text displayed here has some blue text that is not underlined--remember that underlined text takes you to a new Help topic. Text that is blue but not
underlined is linked to a pop-up box. Click the text “Form view” to see a pop-up box.
A pop-up box like the one shown here is not a window (like the Help window, which has a button on the taskbar). It is displayed only until you press Esc or make another window active. Click the Help topic window behind the pop-up window to close it.
The last features on the Help window that you may find useful are the Forward and Back buttons on the toolbar. They work like the Forward and Back buttons on your Web browser--so if you saw the help you needed but kept looking for something better, you can click the Back
button until you once again see the topic you need. Click the Back button now.
Congratulations, you have moved back one window! However, you may now realize this isn’t the information you really need, and you want to return to the window you just traveled back from. Click the Forward button to return to that window.
