More about the Help Viewer

I have some preliminary screen shots of the "Office 12" help viewer.  Remember that this is all pre-beta and so may change some, but it is all working today and indicates our direction in "Office 12". A lot of this is in response to customer feedback on the help viewer in Office 2003.

The viewer is a wrapper around Trident.  Trident is the HTML rendering engine of Internet Explorer.  Because the viewer is a separate Windows executable, it appears in the ALT-TAB process list and can be manipulated independently of the application. However, it also has logic to "pin" to the top of the application window if desired (in this case, it will stay on top of this application's windows, but not windows of other running applications.)

The viewer adds a number of controls in the window that are specific to Office help.  Here's an anatomy of the window:

Here's an example of what this will look like when entered from Excel (e.g. you press F1 in Excel)

Note that search is always available and is correctly scoped - in this case to Excel since you entered from Excel. However, other scopes are also available:

As you can see in this screenshot, we also adopted the more familiar web search metaphor, where search results and the content are shown in the same window and you navigate between them with Back. We think that with the popularity of web search engines, this is a very familiar search method for users today. This works identically when searching both the offline or online content. We will automatically detect the connection state and do the right thing, but you can also manually change the connection state using this dropdown control in the lower right corner of the window:

And for those who prefer the tree-control table of contents, that is also available by clicking on the Table of Contents button in the toolbar: