Technical Editor

[Detroit]

Microsoft Office 2007 Help
Two different types of Microsoft Office Word 2007 Help exist: (1) an online version, which is incrementally updated fairly frequently by Microsoft and (2) an offline version that is stored among the Word 2007 files, which is very infrequently updated. A Word 2007 user can start either of the two Help versions by clicking the question-mark icon at the far right of the Ribbon or by pressing the F1 key on the keyboard whenever the user is in Word 2007. Then the user can select the desired version of Help by making the appropriate selection in the drop-down connection-status menu in the lower-right corner of the home page of Word Help: (1) Show content from Office Online or (2) Show content only from this computer.

The Microsoft Download Center makes available a utility program for installing the latest version of the offline Help. The following--Updates for Microsoft Office Word 2007 Help--describes how to update both the Microsoft Office Word 2007 Help file and the Office Word 2007 Developer Help file.

Updates for Microsoft Office Word 2007 Help Overview
This download replaces the Help (.HxS) files on your computer for Office Word 2007. The download contains the latest revisions and additions to content in those Help files.

By default, wordhelp.msp automatically replaces the current WINWORD.DEV.HXS and WINWORD.HXS files in the \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\1033 directory on the drive where you installed the 2007 Office System. If you installed the 2007 Office System in a different directory, you can locate the files in the \1033 directory, a subdirectory of the \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12.

ABC Amber HxS Converter 3.0
The offline Word 2007 Help files are stored in the HxS file format for use within Word 2007. The ProcessText Group makes available a shareware utility that converts HxS files to other desired formats (PDF, HTML, CHM, RTF, HLP, DOC, TXT, and many more) easily and quickly. This and other Amber utility programs can be evaluated free for 30 days.

A Microsoft Office 2007 user could convert all of the HxS Help files for the individual Office 2007 components to, say, PDFs and store them within the same folder for more convenient reading offline without the need to open Microsoft Office in order to access these Help files. The HxS files for my Microsoft Office Professional 2007 suite were converted into PDF files by the ABC Amber HxS Converter.

Doing so is a fairly automatic procedure: open the desired HxS file, select the output format (PDF, in this case), and after a few minutes, save the file to the desired folder. After the PDF file is completed--a potentially slow process for a relatively slow computer, Acrobat or Reader (whatever default application opens PDF files) opens automatically with the appropriate completed PDF for inspection. Converting the files in the background is the way to go, but the evaluation version does not allow batch processing that the full application has.

A nice application, that ABC Amber HxS Converter. Its price, BTW, is $20 (or roughly $13 if two other ABC Amber converters are also purchased at that reduced price. There are some two dozen other bundled converters for sale. Roll your own bundle, if you wish...