The VB Help System is your reference guide to the VB language. Whenever you don't understand something, you can highlight the word or phrase that you don't understand and click F1. Help will automatically go to the right section for information about whatever you have selected. The Index in VB Help is probably the next most powerful tool. Here's part of an entry that was found by entering With (one of the new statements in the FormLetter macro) into the Index search.

Just for practice, look up some of the other keywords in the FormLetter macro that aren't completely clear to you.

But, in addition to the internal Help system, there is an even more useful external Help: MSDN. MSDN is the "Microsoft Developer Network" and no other software vendor has ever made such an extensive library of technical information available to customers. If you have Internet access at your computer, you can go directly to MSDN from the VB Help menu. MSDN is often cited by authors and speakers as the most useful part of Microsoft.

Although you can get the same kind of 'reference' information at MSDN, it's more useful for updates, corrections, clarifications, and generally any kind of information that changes a lot. One particular part of MSDN needs to be highlighted, and that is the Knowledge Base.

From the beginning, Microsoft has organized their technical notes into simple numbered articles and relied on the MSDN search facility to give you access to them. So, if you're told to "Check out KB 123456!" as the solution to your question on a forum someday, then you know that all you have to do is search on that number at MSDN to find the article. (The "KB" refers to "Knowledge Base".) As an example, I searched on one of the constants in the FormLetter macro, wdCollapseStart and found that Microsoft had written three technical articles that involve it. Here's the result ... with some of the key fields returned by MSDN highlighted.

Another resource that you shouldn't overlook is the newsgroups. Newsgroups are a 'technology in transition'. Microsoft has stated a clear direction to get away from them, but the use of newsgroups is so deep in programming that the best they have been able to do is establish their own selection of newsgroups. A general purpose search engine needs to be used for newsgroups and I recommend the "Groups" option in Google. For the same obscure keyword, wdCollapseStart, Google Groups found 1,280 references. (Only 268 'hits' were found on the web!) If you have used search engines very much, you know that the big problem here is sorting through all the 'stuff' that is of absolutely no interest for the small nuggets of pure gold. All I can say is, when you really need to know ... give it a try.

Now that you have a program and a way to find out what all the strange keywords in it are, lets see exactly what it does in detail. To do that, we follow the advice of the next section: