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Sometimes information can be stored in both the Visual Basic general help text, as well as within this Excel specific object model help text. And unless we are aware of how to access the information, we can miss some of the information. So, just to show you what I mean, we are going to perform a search now, and we are going to be looking at the IfThenElse statement, finding out about that. So to start with what I am going to do is open the help from the menu, which is as, we have seen before, simply the Visual Basic specific information. Now the IfThenElse statement is from the Visual Basic language set, it's not actually an Excel specific thing, although there is Excel specific information available. And just to show you what we can pull up, let's go the index and do the relevant search. IfThenElse has come up. We click, well let's double click on that, and it pulls up the information. Now, you'll see there is an example here. We can select example, and that brings up the example text. This is then a general example, it doesn't refer particularly to Excel, and that's the only example we have available. So if we didn't know, we might leave our investigation just at this point. But there is actually more information to find. And to show you how to access that, let's close help now and instead accessing it by clicking on F1 in the workbook keyword. So help is opened, and again let's do our search on IfThenElse. We have brought up the statement. This time when we click on example though, we come up with two topics found for the example. We have one in the Visual Basic reference, displaying that you'll might remember that's the one we saw before. Going back we also have now though an Excel specific example, and there's that information there So if you want to make sure you get all the help information available on a Visual Basic command, it's well to first access the help by clicking on a Excel keyword bringing up help and then searching, and then you will capture all the information that is available within the help system. Because the help files are stored separately on the computer, it's possible to access them directly without going through Excel or the VBA editor for that matter. And in so doing, you can have some advantages because the interface can sometimes be different, and we can have control over exactly what we are accessing. To show you what I mean, I've setup a couple of shortcuts on the desktop which access help files directly. So here we are on the desktop. Let's just right click on Visual Basic here, selecting properties, you can see that the target file here is VBUI6.CHM. That's the actual help file for Visual Basic, the master one, and it's stored under Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VBA\VBA6\1033. So that's one possibility, the other one we have here is setup for Excel, and this one here is VBAXL9 because it's the object model9.CHM, and it's stored under Program\Files\Microsoft Office\Office. [00:04;28.0] Let's open up one of these now and take a look. So you will see here that the interface is different to what we saw before. We now have an index and a search facility as opposed to the answer wizard. And there's also a favorite section where we can mark particular topics, we can hide or show the table of contents, and here this locate button enables us to find where a topic is located within the table of contents. On the search facility, you also have an option here to use various Boolean search operators, and we are given options here to search only titles, match similar words, or search through previous results to narrow down a search. So we have a few more options there. We'll close that and look briefly at the Excel version. Well here we can see that Excel is simpler. We simply have a contents, and a search tab. Now you may see other topics here apart from the ones listed. In fact this one here, the SQL reference which I don't have loaded in my system, is for databases. And there are a number of database help files that you can also access when you load these particular master help files. That just depends on how you have your system setup. Finally then, let's have a look at what information is stored where. On this chart you will see that topics marked in blue are available after pressing F1 on an Excel VBA keyword. While topics marked with maroon are available after selecting Microsoft Visual Basic help, from the Visual Basic editor help menu. You will see here that some have both a maroon and blue square, which means that by either access method you will be able to see topics in that particular help file. Whereas these ones are specific only to access via clicking on a VBA keyword and then pressing F1; these ones can only be accessed by choosing help from the Microsoft Visual Basic help menu. So you will see here that these Excel specific ones are the ones of course that come up by clicking on the keyword, and the more overview topics are accessed via clicking on the help menu of the VBA editor. One of the most important ones there you might want to have a look through is the Visual Basic user interface help, as that explains exactly how use the editor, and it's what we will be going through the any case in greater detail in a subsequent chapter. I will leave you now to explore the details of these in your own time. And we will move on in our coverage - the next chapter looks at macros.