Developing Office Solutions

This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release.

So what do you need to know in order to build a solution based on Microsoft® Office 2000? For starters, it helps to adopt good coding standards and stick to them. This is the subject of Chapter 3, "Writing Solid Code." Chapter 3 addresses necessary evils such as naming conventions and code structure that, in the end, make your code more efficient, more reusable, easier to maintain, and better documented.

Chapter 4, "Understanding Office Objects and Object Models," is an in-depth look at the heart of Office solution-building, the object model. This chapter covers all the ins and outs of working with an application's objects, not only from within that application itself, but also from other applications through Automation (formerly OLE Automation).

From Chapter 5, "Working with Office Applications," you can learn the ropes of writing code with Microsoft Access, Microsoft® Excel, Microsoft FrontPage®, Microsoft Outlook®, Microsoft PowerPoint®, and Microsoft Word objects. Chapter 5 provides lots of valuable information and reusable code for working with each Office application's object model.

Chapter 6, "Working with Shared Office Components," is devoted to the objects in the Microsoft Office object model, which all of the Office 2000 applications share. The Office object model provides command bars, file-searching capabilities, the Office Assistant, and objects for working with HTML documents and script.

You can hone your programming skills with Chapter 7, "Getting the Most Out of Visual Basic for Applications." This chapter provides useful procedures for working with strings, numbers, dates, and arrays.

Writing bulletproof code is the subject of Chapter 8, "Error Handling and Debugging." This chapter covers the tools of the trade, the debugging features for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code and for script. It also discusses techniques for constructing effective error handlers.

Chapter 9, "Custom Classes and Objects," delves into the intricacies of creating custom objects and object models by using class modules. This chapter demonstrates how to build custom objects with their own properties, methods, and events, and how to leverage your existing code by implementing interfaces.

In Chapter 10, "The Windows API and Other Dynamic-Link Libraries," you can learn the basics of calling functions in DLLs from VBA. This chapter includes examples of calls to Windows API functions that may be useful to VBA developers.

Chapter 11, "Add-ins, Templates, Wizards, and Libraries," walks you through the process of creating a COM add-in for Office applications or for the Visual Basic® Editor. It also discusses how to create application-specific add-ins, wizards, and code libraries.

The new Web technologies integrated into Office 2000 are the topic of Chapter 12, "Using Web Technologies." This chapter covers the basics of dynamic HTML, cascading style sheets, and scripting. It also explores the Microsoft Office Web Components, new controls that make it easy to publish interactive data to the Web.

If your solution is complex, you may want to provide a custom Help file for your users. Chapter 13, "Adding Help to Your Custom Solution," gives you the information you need to create your own Help system based on HTML Help.