I've been frustrated about something ever since I upgraded to from Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 ... When I am in the VB Code window, writing code, and I have a question or encounter a syntax error or whatever ... it seems almost impossible to get any useful info from F1 / Help. In prior Excel versions (2003 and earlier) I could simply highlight the word (property, function, or whatever), press <F1>, and then the LOCAL help file would open up. This was very quick and most of the time it actually opened right on the very page I needed to read to educate myself about the property, function, etc.
Now with Excel 2007, it seems that whenever I press F1 the behavior is no longer "context sensitive" like it was previously. Instead, I get a few second delay where the feedback says something like "contacting MS Office online for information" and then what opens is some kind of generic (and pretty useless) listing of the highest level help topics that might exist. Then I usually try navigating the table of contents / hyperlinks, looking for whatever I'm after. Then after a while I try SEARCHing for the keyword that I had highlighted in the first place. All this takes more time than its worth and mostly I never find what I'm after. In fact, what I have been doing instead, is just Googling whatever I'm after -- for example "VBA SET Statement". And though this works, it produces rather random information, from various sources ... and I'm the kind of person that would prefer to RTFM myself, instead. But since accessing the help info is now so difficult, that's what I've been doing. Pretty sad...
So ... my question is this: is there some configuration setting or something that I can change somewhere, that influences this behavior -- uses whatever local help information still exists?
And by the way ... the help WITHIN EXCEL works kind of this same way, too -- instead of giving me the local help file where I can, for example, look up some specific Function ... it "contacts MS Office online" instead, and then gives me content that is too generic to be useful. So I have the same question on this basic help within Excel -- does the local help file still exist and can I have it pulled up as my first preference?
Thanks for any ideas.
ADam
Now with Excel 2007, it seems that whenever I press F1 the behavior is no longer "context sensitive" like it was previously. Instead, I get a few second delay where the feedback says something like "contacting MS Office online for information" and then what opens is some kind of generic (and pretty useless) listing of the highest level help topics that might exist. Then I usually try navigating the table of contents / hyperlinks, looking for whatever I'm after. Then after a while I try SEARCHing for the keyword that I had highlighted in the first place. All this takes more time than its worth and mostly I never find what I'm after. In fact, what I have been doing instead, is just Googling whatever I'm after -- for example "VBA SET Statement". And though this works, it produces rather random information, from various sources ... and I'm the kind of person that would prefer to RTFM myself, instead. But since accessing the help info is now so difficult, that's what I've been doing. Pretty sad...
So ... my question is this: is there some configuration setting or something that I can change somewhere, that influences this behavior -- uses whatever local help information still exists?
And by the way ... the help WITHIN EXCEL works kind of this same way, too -- instead of giving me the local help file where I can, for example, look up some specific Function ... it "contacts MS Office online" instead, and then gives me content that is too generic to be useful. So I have the same question on this basic help within Excel -- does the local help file still exist and can I have it pulled up as my first preference?
Thanks for any ideas.
ADam
