About getting help for charts

When you are working in a design program, you can get help designing a chart in the following ways:

• Design program Help For information about the commands and features available in the design program to work with charts, see Help for the design program. For example, in Microsoft Access, click the Office Assistant, or click Microsoft Access Help .

  Microsoft Excel provides both general Help about saving Excel data for use on Web pages and specific information about saving charts for use on Web pages. To access this Help in Excel, click the Office Assistant, or click Microsoft Excel Help .

• Chart design-time Help If you have access to the Commands and Options dialog box in another design program, you have access to the Help topics you are viewing now. In a chart that you have created or activated in a design program, open the Commands and Options dialog box, click the General tab, and then click Help , or right-click the chart and click Help on the shortcut menu.

You can use scripts and programs to automate charts, or you can include charts in run-time programs other than Web browsers— programs that you develop in a programming environment such as Microsoft Visual Basic.

Writing scripts Microsoft Office programs provide the Microsoft Script Editor to help you write scripts. For example, you can use the Script Editor from data access page Design view in Microsoft Access to customize a chart. For information about running the Script Editor, see Help in your Office design program. In the Script Editor, you can display additional Help about using its features and writing scripts.

Object model Help For Help developing a program or script to work with a chart list, you can display information about the object model, properties, and methods specific to charts. This object model Help is installed whenever you install the Microsoft Office Web Components, of which the Chart Component is one. Depending on the design program you're using, you can access this Help in the following ways:

• Help in Microsoft Visual Basic In Visual Basic or Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can create a reference to the Microsoft Office Web Components library. You will then have access to Help through the object browser or by selecting a keyword and pressing F1. For information about creating references and using object model Help, see Help in VBA.
• Help in other environments If you are using another development environment, locate and double-click the Help file Owcvba11.chm.

Help available from the browser For users who have Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.01 SP2 or later and the Microsoft Office Web Components, general Help specific to charts is automatically available. This run-time Help is separate from the Help available from the browser's Help menu.

Help available from the chart The run-time chart Help topics provide general information for all users about using charts in the browser— such as how to use the toolbar and the context menu, and how to work with the field list and fields when a chart is based on a PivotTable list or database table or query.

The run-time chart Help does not include information about working with the Commands and Options dialog box, so it is not the same as the chart design Help topics you are reading now. Depending on the skills of your users and the type of work they want to do, you might want to supplement this run-time Help by providing custom instructions on the Web page for your chart, or provide a hyperlink to another Web page that has instructions on it.

Other Office Web Components, such as the PivotTable Component and Spreadsheet Component, also have their own separate Help available in the browser.

To see what Help is provided in the browser, create a chart on a Web page, open the Web page in Internet Explorer, right-click the chart, and then click Help on the shortcut menu. In the Help window, you can view a table of contents and search the topic text. The Office Assistant is not available in the browser to answer questions.