Extract text from Microsoft Help assets (MSHA)
To convert MSHA Help assets to another format, you need Visual Studio or other Developer software.
To convert other file formats to the "Help Asset File" file type, you need software like Visual Studio or a similar tool.
The .msha file is a manifest document used by Microsoft Help Viewer to install local offline documentation. It acts as an index that points to the actual help articles, which are stored separately in compressed mshc archives. Developers typically encounter these files when downloading offline documentation for Visual Studio or other enterprise Microsoft applications.
This format is proprietary and highly specialized. It has severe disadvantages for general users. It does not contain actual help articles. It only stores metadata like package names, locales, and version updates using specific HTML and XML structures. If you do not have the related documentation packages, the .msha file is completely useless. You cannot open it in a standard web browser for reading, and it requires the exact Microsoft ecosystem to function as intended.
Because it relies on structured text, you can convert an .msha file to TXT, XML, or HTML to extract the internal manifest data. Converting to these formats will allow you to read the package index and file paths, but you will not recover the missing help articles.
This is a closed, proprietary manifest format. Standard online converters fail to process it because they attempt to render a visual document from raw installation data. If our analysis detects the supported underlying text format, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your MSHA file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert MSHA file to , you can use Visual Studio or similar software from the "Documentation Package Manifest" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to MSHA, try Visual Studio or another comparable tool in the "Documentation Package Manifest" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our MSHA converter.