More Advanced Procedures > Using Context-Sensitive Help

All modern applications should make full use of context-sensitive help. Available context-sensitive help technologies in Windows now include tooltips (mouseover hints), What's This? help, Help buttons in dialogs, F1 context help, training card help (a Microsoft technology for interactive tutorials) and interactive wizards. See Context-sensitive help technologies for more details on this.

Implementing context-sensitive help takes a little work up front but it will save you a huge amount of time and money later because it will make your product much easier to understand for your users. And that will translate into fewer support requests. Also, applications with good context-sensitive help are more popular and sell better because they are easier to use.

Normal and popup context-sensitive topics:

Context-sensitive help can use both normal topics included in your Table of Contents (TOC) and popup topics.

•	A normal context-sensitive topic is a just any topic in your TOC called directly by your application, and it is always displayed together with the entire help.

•	Context-sensitive popup topics are displayed on their own in a little window that is closed after the user has read the text.

Context help is only fully supported in Winhelp and HTML Help:

You can make standard HTML calls to normal topics in Browser-based Help from applications but the full range of context help features is only supported in Winhelp Note that Windows Vista does not support Winhelp. If you want to be compatible with Vista you must transition to a different help format. and HTML Help. In particular, all the popup context-sensitive help functions described in this chapter are only supported in Winhelp and HTML Help.

For more details on context-sensitive help, the available context-sensitive help technologies and implementation information for programmers see the Context-Sensitive Help & Popups chapter in the Reference section.