Access ANSYS V12 HELP without ANSYS installed

In older versions, ANSYS HELPs were some standalone files which are located under ANSYS installation directory. We could copy such file as “ansyshelp.chm” easily to another computer without ANSYS installed. Furthermore for V11 ANSYS offers a web-based service ExpertSearch, which contains HELPs from most of ANSYS' products. However for V12, such a web-based service is not available yet. And there are some chm files under the installation directory but they are the one we refer to frequently. So should we continue using older versions? Of course not. Here are two solutions.

One solution is to download all manuals in PDF format from ANSYS Customer Portal. For those who like read text in paper form, it is a good choice.

For those who want to open the HELP in a usual way and enjoy all advantages as we mentioned in our last blog article, here is the second solution. First find these two folders, “help” and “jre”, in the installation folder and copy them to anywhere you want. The path showed here is for V12.0. For those whose use V12.1, just change v120 to v121 in the path.

Step 2, find “javaw.exe” in the folder “jre\intel\bin”, right-click on it and choose “Send To: Desktop”. Now we get a “Shortcut to javaw.exe” in desktop.

Step 3, open the properties of the shortcut icon, change Target to the following setting and click on OK:

C:\V12\HELP\jre\intel\bin\javaw.exe -cp "C:\V12\HELP\help" HelpDocViewer

Now we can start ANSYS V12 HELP by double-clicking the shortcut icon.

Do you want to learn more?

 EDR provides a training course that covers basic Workbench operations, as well as other interesting topics.

 Or contact our ANSYS Support to ask for hints!