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Help Viewer and Programmability Help

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One of the questions I've heard is about help for the object models Office programs expose.  In particular, some users are very interested in object model or developer help; some end-users would only be confused by this, since they don't understand Visual Basic or the programmability features of Office applications.

I'm happy to say that improving developer help was a key goal of ours in Office 12.  In particular:

  • We're putting all the Developer content on Office Online as well as MSDN.  That way, we can use the same feedback and metrics we use for end-user help to improve developer content.  And when you're connected to the Internet and search for developer content from the Office 12 applications, you'll always get the most up-to-date and best content from Office Online.

  • We're making Developer content a separate search scope, both for offline content and online content.

  • For the first time, we're documenting object model changes between previous Office versions (back to Office 97) and Office 12.

  • The structure will follow the Visual Studio 2005 model for developer content.