Context-Sensitive Help for Forms and Controls

Providing context-sensitive help in an application can save users time trying to find information instead of making them navigate through a Help Contents page or an Index.

Context-sensitive help gets the user to the required information quickly and directly by being "aware" of which control has focus when the user presses F1.

The following sections discuss three easy ways to add contextsensitive help to your application:

HelpContextID Help. This type of help uses the traditional F1 key to show help information to a user.
ToolTips. This type of help shows brief messages to the user when the mouse pauses over an object.
WhatsThisHelp. This type of help uses the WhatsThis icon to let users query the meaning of an object.

NOTE : VB Uses WinHelp and HTML Help Files Identically. When you implement context-sensitive help as described in the following sections, you don't need to worry about whether the project's Help file is a WinHelp or an HTML Help file: both file types furnish Topic IDs for their help topics, and the VB programmer uses the two different file types in exactly the same way to provide context-sensitive help, as described below.