Tuesday, 16 January 2018

VBA - Where is VB Language Reference compiled help on my computer

Currently working on another post and decoding an error and discovered that the help link was broken. On my machine it has been placed elsewhere. As this is now a movable feast I show here how to find this nice help file. The file is called vblr6.chm. It could either be in a the subdirectory of C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86); so try both using the following template.


C:\Program Files>dir vblr6.chm /s > %tmp%\vblr6_chm_dir.txt

The above command will scour all subdirectories. I use dir foo.bar /s very often and sometime it produces very many results so I pipe it to a temp file. Also the operation can take a long while if using dir foo.bar /s from the root directory! So I launch this command and come back to it later. When it is finished I open the file with Notepad using...


C:\Program Files>Notepad  %tmp%\vblr6_chm_dir.txt

and then Notepad contains the Dir listing


 Volume in drive C is OS
 Volume Serial Number is DEAD-BEEF

 Directory of C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\vfs\ProgramFilesCommonX86\Microsoft Shared\VBA\VBA7.1\1033

26/11/2017  12:59           926,475 VBLR6.CHM
               1 File(s)        926,475 bytes

     Total Files Listed:
               1 File(s)        926,475 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  2,728,976,478,208 bytes free

So finally entering in the command line solely the filename, in quotes because of spaces, will throw a dialog box saying do you want to open file with Help Viewer and if one responds yes then one gets the help file in an application as shown here.


C:\Program Files>"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\vfs\ProgramFilesCommonX86\Microsoft Shared\VBA\VBA7.1\1033\VBLR6.CHM"

No comments:

Post a Comment