Help Context IDs
Excel's online help is very useful. If you're developing an application that will be used by others, you may want to make it easy for the user to display a particular help topic from one of Excel's help files. You can use Application.Help to display any help topic in any help file. But in order to use the Help method, you must know the context ID of the help topic. As far as I can tell, that information is not available anywhere -- until now.
- Download IDnumbersfiles.zip (153K)
This zip archive contains two Excel workbooks: (1) Shows context IDs for Excel's functions; (2) Shows context IDs for Excel 2000, 2002, and 2003. Thanks to Ron de Bruin for creating these workbooks and making them available.
Using the Help Context IDs
To make use of this file, locate the help topic of interest and make a note of its context ID. Then, write a VBA subroutine that displays the topic. You can attach the subroutine to a button, or provide some other way for the user to execute the sub.
For example, if you'd like to display the help topic that describes how to name cells, you'll find that the context ID for that particular topic is 5225848. The following VBA procedure displays that help topic (assumes Excel 2000).
Sub ShowHelp()
Application.Help Application.Path & "\1036\XLMAIN9.CHM", 5225848
End Sub
Excel 2003 can also access help information from Microsoft's Web site. Ron's file also contains the URLs for these help topics. For example, the URL for the DATEDIFF function is:
http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/offhelp/off2000/excel/xlmain9/html/xlfctDATEDIF.htm