Getting Help

The Excel 2007 Help system shows itself in a number of ways that you may or may not expect from working with other programs. Most of the time, you access Help by clicking the Help button in the upper-right corner of your Ribbon. (The Help button contains the image of a question mark with a circle around it.) This action brings up the default Help page, as shown in Figure below.

On this page, Excel provides a series of links to the topics that Microsoft believes users will need to access most often. To access any of the topics, you click the blue linked text. Follow these steps to use the Help system to find out what is new in Excel 2007:

1. Open Excel. Click the Help button. Notice the online indicator in the lower-right area of the Help page.
   
   
2. Click the What is New link. The Help page displays the list of links for the new information topics.
   
   
3. Click the What's New in Microsoft Excel 2007 link. The first part of the page for this Help topic appears. As you read through the page, you can change the font size, and you change the size of the page by clicking and dragging its edges.
   
   
4. Use the Back arrow button or the Home button to return to the main Help page.
   You navigate Help pages the same way you navigate in your browser. You can use the Forward, Back, and Home buttons to move between the Help topics you have seen.
   
   
5. Click the Getting Help link. This Help page displays a list of Help subcategories as well as a list of topics for getting help.
   
   
6. Read through the list of available Help categories. Click and read any that you think are useful.
   In addition to navigating the Help topics by using the established links, you can find help about topics by typing a phrase into the Search box and searching for help.
   
   
7. Find the Search box at the top of the Excel Help window.Type the word pivot into the search box and either click Search or press Enter. A page that flashes on-screen tells you that Excel is searching the Help system for your topics. Then it lists the 20 results it found. Each item listed is a link to a Help item that references the word pivot. To see all topics, use the scroll bar to the right to scroll through the topics.