If you're familiar with Microsoft Office or other application software, you have probably used Help systems before. Microsoft is moving their Help to more of an "online" model where your system automatically checks Microsoft's servers for information in most cases. (There is an option to only use local information.)
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 press the F1 key. Help will automatically go to the right section for information about whatever you have selected. You might try highlighting Open in the first statement and pressing F1 to see how it works.
MSDN
In addition to the 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. (My Word installation had a bug in it and linked to an invalid location at Microsoft. If nothing comes up on your system, try going to msdn.microsoft.com and searching for "Office Developer".)
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 made them available through MSDN. So, if you're told to "Check out KB 123456!" as the answer to a question 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, here's a KB article about Word, VBA, and security: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282830/en-us
Newsgroups
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 widespread in programming that the best they have been able to do is establish their own selection of newsgroups. I recommend Google Groups for searching newsgroups. For searching Microsoft, give their Live Search a try in MSDN. If you have used search engines before, you know that the big problem here is sorting through all the hits that are 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. We do that on the next page.
