ODE97: Cannot Redistribute Office Assistant with Run-Time Application

When you create a custom application using the Microsoft Office 97 Developer Edition Tools (ODE), and that application includes the Office Assistant object or the Assistant's Balloon object, you cannot distribute your application to users who do not have a retail copy of Microsoft Access 97 on their computers.

The Office Assistant, the Assistant's Balloon, and all of the items inside the balloon are controlled programmatically through the Assistant portion of the Microsoft Office object model. Each of the items in the following list are represented in Visual Basic through the Assistant Object and can only be distributed to Microsoft Access 97 retail application users:

• Assistant Actions
• Balloons
• Balloon Headings, text, check boxes, and labels.

The Assistant Object and all its associated code will work with the /runtime switch, which provides the Assistant functionality in the corporate environment where full retail copies of Microsoft Access 97 are being used.

You can choose runtime command line options for your application in the ODE Setup wizard on the screen marked "Add the shortcuts that you want your custom Setup program to create and then set properties for each shortcut," on the Database Shortcut Properties tab, in the Run-Time dialog box. You can also create a shortcut for your command line option. The following example syntax starts Microsoft Access, and then opens the Northwind.mdb sample database in the runtime environment:

For more information about using the Office Assistant, click Contents And Index on the Help menu, and type "Office Assistant" (without the quotation marks).

For more information about command-line options you can use in Microsoft Access, click the Office Assistant, type "Start Microsoft Access with command-line options," click Search, and then click to view the "Start Microsoft Access with command-line options" topic.

NOTE: If the Assistant is hidden, click the Office Assistant button on the Standard toolbar. If Microsoft Access Help is not installed on your computer, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: