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View the Help home page for an Office program or tool

Each program in Microsoft Office has its own Help home page. This page can be a good place to get an overview of a program. On the Help home page, you can browse to other topics or search for topics by typing your question in the Type words to search for box.

To open the Help home page, do one of the following in the main window of one of these Microsoft Office system programs or tools:

Access, Excel, PowerPoint, or Word

InfoPath, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Publisher, SharePoint Designer, Visio, or Clip Organizer

  1. On the Help menu, click Program Name Help, where Program Name is the name of the program you are in, for example, Microsoft Office InfoPath Help.

    Keyboard shortcut To open Help, press F1.

Note The home page that is displayed depends on the setting in the Search list search list in help. For more information, see .

Get help on a command in Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, or Word

All commands that are available in these programs are available on the Ribbon. When you rest the pointer on a command on the Ribbon, a ScreenTip is displayed to give you information about what that command does. If you see the message Press F1 for more help, continue to rest the pointer on the command and press F1 to get more information about using that command.

Note In Microsoft Office Outlook, the Ribbon is displayed only in the window of an open item, such as an e-mail message or appointment.

Get help on a dialog box

When a Microsoft Office program displays a dialog box, sometimes it is not clear how to use the options to accomplish a task. To get help while you work in a dialog box, do the following:

  1. Click Help button image, which is located in the title bar of the dialog box that you are using.

    Keyboard shortcut To open Help, press F1.

  2. If there is a Help topic available for the dialog box, the topic is displayed. Otherwise, the Help home page is displayed.

Get developer help

In some Microsoft Office programs, you can use Help to get conceptual and reference information about how to develop Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) procedures that extend the capabilities of Microsoft Office to meet business needs. To get developer help, do the following:

  1. In the Microsoft Office program that contains the object model that you want to use, press F1.
  2. In the Search list search list in help, do one of the following:
    • To get the most up-to-date content, under Content from Office Online, click Developer Reference.
    • To get content from your computer, under Content from this computer, click Developer Reference.