help pages not working

Hi there

There is something wrong with the help pages in my version of Excel, and I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this problem.

When I'm in the VBA editor and click on "HELP/MICROSOFT VISUAL BASIC HELP" I can enter in some search string. A list of items appear. Some of them I can click on, and a help page pops up with information. But certain items I click on and nothing happens. The items which are not displaying help are those with "Visual Basic for Applications" appearing in parentheses after the item.

For example, I can search for "split" to get information about the split function. There is one item called "Split property", which I can click on with no problem. But the one labeled "Split Function (Visual Basic for Applications)" does not work!

Has anyone seen this? Do you know what I need to do to fix it?

Thanks!
Emma

Hi Emma,

I am using Excel 2003. I notice using F1 from the VB Editor there are times that a blank (grey) page comes up. Recently I even got a very strange message that the topic I was looking for was intentionally removed from help (cannot recall the exact wording; I'll see if I can re-create it and post it here).

Have not made the correlation that you have. So, I can't say if it is Visual Basic for Applications or not.

When you click on Tools >> References, is one of the "checked" references "Visual Basic For Applications"? If not ... well, it should be.

Hi there

When I click on Tools >> References, I see that the item called "Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Extensibility 5.3" is checked. There is another item called "Visual Basic for Applications". But if I check that one and click "ok" I get the error "Name conflicts with existing module, project, or object library". Do you know what this is about??

Another example of when I have this problem is the following... When I click on HELP >> MS VISUAL BASIC HELP, I first see a Table of Contents. If I go into the topic labeled "basic documentation", and click on the function category, and then click on some function, nothing happens.

Any ideas?

Thanks
Emma

Oh wait, I see now that I DO have "Visual Basic for Apllications" checked in the list of available references under TOOLS >> REFERENCES. There were other entries with identical name lower in the list which were NOT checked, and that is what confused me. (Now it makes sense why I was getting that error.)

But anyway... that didn't seem to fix it.

Emma

Sorry that did not fix the problem. It was a shot in the dark, anyway, since I know I DO have that checked on both of my PCs and I still get the gray screen with some frequency.

Hopefully someone else has better ideas than I.

Does anyone know of an online version of the VBA Help System, that I can use instead (or til I get this fixed)? Some place where all the functions are listed and described in detail of how they work?

I have a book on VBA, but it doesn't have a function dictionary like this either...

Thanks!
Emma

Maybe not what you were looking for exactly ... but, you can download the complete Excel VBA Language Reference from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Here is the on-line version ...
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...ffice.11).aspx

That's even better, actually. Thanks a million!

Emma

Ok, I downloaded it and installed it, but I guess the way you're supposed to access it is through the usual VBA Help system, and that still doesn't work. :-(

Thanks
Emma

Sorry about that. I should have tried it myself first. I found the first link while looking for the second. It sounded promising.

Yea, it did sound promising. When reading the description, I thought myself that it would be the solution!

Oh well... I posted my question on a couple of other sites just now. We'll see if I get some answers there, and I'll post it here if I do.

Thanks
Emma