Access tries to help you as much as possible, but not even a wizard can answer all your questionsit can only help you through the current task. When you have questions, the best place to look is the Help feature. To access this feature, simply press F1 or choose Microsoft Access Help from the Help menu. Doing so will open the Microsoft Access Help pane (refer to Figure 1.1 at the beginning of this chapter). There are several things you can do at this point:
To close the Help pane, click the Close button (X) at the top right corner of the pane's title bar. The Help feature is context sensitive. That means, it will open files that best relate to the selected object, item, property, or text. (When Help can't guess, it opens the generic pane you just saw.) To see the difference between the generic Help Task Pane and the context-sensitive response, open the Catalogs table in design view. Select the Country field (any field will do really), and then select the Input Mask property in the lower pane. Now, press F1 and Access will display a Help topic that's specific to the Input Mask property, as shown in Figure 17.10. Close the Help window and return to the Catalogs table. Select a different property and press F1 to see a Help topic that pertains to the selected property. That's context-sensitive Help. Figure 17.10. Display context-sensitive Help topics.
Note
Finding Help OnlineSo far, the Help topics you've seen have been a part of Access' Help files that are available if you install them. There's more information online. To access these sites, click the Microsoft Access Help button on the Database toolbar to open the Help pane shown in Figure 17.11, and then click any choice in the Microsoft Office Online section. Or, choose Microsoft Office Online from the Help menu. Figure 17.11. Find more information online.
|