I have been looking at the BINDER component distributed with MS Office xx.
It looks like there were few if any changes between Office97 and Office2000 versions of the component. At least they both seem to use the same named "Help" (if you can call it that) .chm.

In any case, I have some questions regarding its basic 'operation':

1) Is there any way to increase the size of left-side pane that displays the documents in the binder? Right now all I can get it to do is to show the document icon and an arrow when it is selected, but the file name has to be hovered over in order to see a reasonable portion of its name.

2) Is there any way to make the binder application close ALL of its documents while it is open, so that none is displayed? Right now it opens with the last selected document and I can see no way to close the document except by opening another document. Even then, I don't know if it is closed or just hidden.
The primary reason for wanting toclose all documents is to be able to access the BINDER Help. At present the Help offered is for the file type of the currently displayed document, so when a Word doc. is open it is Help for word that is accessible.

3) How does one access the Help for Binder once a document has been added to the BINDER?

4) Is it possible to use BINDER to store documents other than OfficeXX documents? For instance, e-mail from Lotus Notes or Outlook, .TXT files, etc.

5) BINDER seems to keep separate copies of whatever documents are stored in it - if I change the original or the one that I copied into BINDER, each has ONLY the changes I made to the individual copy. Is there any setting that can be used to simply have BINDER 'point' to an external document, so that any updates done are reflected when the BINDER is used for access?

6) Is there some way to do a "Find" to search ALL documents in a Binder for a specific word/phrase?

7) Do you know some place I can reference to learn to 'design intention' of BINDER? All I seem to find in the help is How To... and I really want to find something that describes Why.... For instance... IF it truly does keep only separate copies of (added) documents, WHY?...there must be some good reason for this. What is the purpose of being able to create documents within Binder? One purpose seems to be to "consolidate/standardize" printing of Binder documents, giving them common header/footers and the like. But what happens to the headers/footers that may already be in a document - are they overwritten or printed as well?

Your help will be appreciated.

Jim