Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

appendix b: the office help system 689

Turning the Assistant Off

Just clicking the Assistant window’s Close box makes Max wave goodbye and van-

ish, but he may still reappear now and then. If you’d rather not include him in your

Office experience ever, use the Office X command that has a certain population of

Mac fans cheering: Help→Turn Assistant Off.

For help turning the Assistant off, choose Help→Office Help Contents, click Help

on the Standard toolbar, or press the Help key. All of these methods open the Help

Contents window (see below). Tips are still available when the Assistant is turned

off; a light bulb appears next to the Help button on the Standard toolbar when Office

is offering a tip.

Tip: Sometimes, when you turn on the Assistant from the Help menu after working without Max’s (or

Bosgrove’s) help for a while, the Assistant window appears completely white and empty when it opens.

Even the close button doesn’t work. As with many Office X annoyances, this one goes away if you install

Service Release 1, as described on page 12 .

The Help Index

The Office Assistant has its charms, but help screens are the real meat of Microsoft’s

help. These screens—which are supposed to take the place of a hard-copy manual in

Office X—appear when you use one of these methods:

• Do a search using the Office Assistant, as described on page 686.

• Choose Help→Office Help Contents.

• Turn the Assistant off (as described above), and click the Help button on the

Standard toolbar or press the Help key.

The Help window opens, as shown in Figure B-3. The three buttons at the top of this

window offer three approaches to finding information in the Help system:

• The Contents button displays the master list of topics in the left pane of the Help

screen. Click one of these topics (you don’t need to click the flippy triangle) for a

list of subtopics, as shown in Figure B-3. Each subtopic is a hyperlink that opens

the topic’s help screen in the right pane.

• Clicking the A-Z Index button changes the contents of the left pane to a list of

hyperlinks, one for each letter of the alphabet. Clicking a letter shows a list of

topics that begin with that letter. Click a topic name to see a list of subtopics,

which are once again links to pertinent help screens. This method may be the

quickest when you know exactly what you want to look up—margins or tables,

for example.

• Clicking Search opens a text box and a Search button in the left pane. Type a few

key words into the box and click Search—this approach is exactly the same as,

and produces the same results as, typing into Max’s search window. The topics

The Assistant