Online Help and Contextual Help in Microsoft Excel 2016
During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, we will show you where you can access Help in this version of Excel. You will find that Help is not available offline in Excel 2016, but rather online only.
Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2016.
In this section we’re going to take a look at Help and there is actually a lot of very useful help available when you’re using Excel 2016 but virtually all of it is online help which means you do need to be connected to the internet in order to take advantage of the help.
Now first of all very simply to access the Help system you will normally see somewhere around about the top right hand corner of the screen a little question mark icon, Microsoft Excel Help, takes me into Help.
Now the Help system is a browser based system. So it runs in a little web browser. As you can see there Excel 2016 Help little Search box. I’m just going to make that a little bit bigger.
Want More? Get Started With a Free Excel 2016 Course! Click Here
Now let’s suppose I want help on Series Fill, something that we did a little bit earlier on in the course. Type the term in there, click on the little Search button and it comes up with a number of topics related to filling data automatically in worksheet cells. I go to the first one. It takes me to a Help page. What do you want to do? It gives me a list of all the things I might want to do in relation to Series Fill. If I choose one of those it will either take me to a point on this page or sometimes to another page within the Help system. And then I can use the Browse buttons to go backwards and forwards through the available help.
There is a Home button that takes me back to the Help home. There is a Print button where I can print a particular Help topic and there’s also this button which will give me larger text on Help. So if you have a problem reading to Help of a particular size, let’s try that Series Fill again. At the larger size all of the help appears larger and then of course I can shrink it down again if I want to.
So that’s the basics of using Help in Excel 2016. When I finished using Help I can click on Close.
Now there is a keyboard shortcut for bringing up Help in Excel 2016 and you use the F1 key. So let me press the F1 key now and that’s an alternative way of bringing up Excel 2016 Help.
So let’s see what happens now if I try to get help when I’m not connected to the internet. I’ve disconnected. I’m going to click on Help and the message I get is: Help is only available online. If you’ve used an earlier version of Excel there was always some kind of offline help available but there is now virtually nothing available with Excel 2016. So you really do need to be connected to the internet in order to get any significant amount of help.
Now the expression I used there was any significant amount of help. There are some other ways in which Excel 2016 can help you even when you are not online. This is not really the Help system but there are various features, some of which you can enable or disable, which can help you. For instance, if I hover over a command and my settings are correct I can get what’s called a Screen Tip and a Screen Tip can explain to me what a particular command can do.
We also have a new feature in Excel 2016 that we’re going to look at a little bit later on which is the Tell Me feature and there is this box at the top of the Ribbon, Tell me what you want to do, which is also a type of help that can be very useful. But in terms of formal help itself you do need to be online.
Now I mentioned earlier on in this section that you’ll normally see that question mark icon towards the top right of the screen. Sometimes you don’t. I don’t know whether it’s Microsoft’s intention to restore that situation. If you don’t you can always hit the F1 key of course. The situation in which you’ll see that question mark is when you are working in some dialogues in Excel. You will be able to access contextual help.
Now let me just explain what I mean by that. Let’s suppose I open up one of the dialogues, the one related to font settings, for example. Don’t worry if you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about here because I’m going to explain this later on. This dialogue lets me choose the font for text and to do things like decide whether it’s going to be bold, the size of the font and so on.
And many of the dialogues that you use in Excel 2016 have that little question mark icon. Now it is a Help icon. If I click on Help not only does it access the Help system but it gives me contextual help. It goes straight to a topic which relates to the dialogue that I’ve clicked Help from. So in this case it’s gone into a changing the color of text Help topic.
Want More? Get Started With a Free Excel 2016 Course! Click Here
Now of course I can still use the Help here in the usual way. So if I wanted to search for something unrelated to the color of text or anything else to do with text I can carry on use Help in the normal way. And then of course when I finish I close the Help by clicking on the Close button on the browser.
So that’s pretty much it for Help at the moment. I’ll be using it now and again during the course. Make sure that you become familiar with it. Having said that let’s just try one other thing here which you might find useful. If I go into that Help and type “Getting Started” there are quite a few topics in here related to getting started with particular aspects of using Excel.
Now the ones that you can see here first in the list are ones that are really quite advanced topics, things like Getting Started with 3D Maps. But for any topic that you want to find out about it’s always worth searching the Help to see if there is any sort of getting started or introductory help related to that topic.
Anyway that’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
