Visual Basic Concepts

ActiveX Documents

One of the most exciting features of Visual Basic is the ability to create ActiveX documents, forms that can appear within Internet browser windows. Visual Basic ActiveX documents offer built-in viewport scrolling, Hyperlinks, and menu negotiation.

ActiveX documents are designed the same way you design Visual Basic forms. They can contain insertable objects, such as Microsoft Excel pivot tables. They can also show message boxes and secondary forms.

Visual Basic ActiveX documents can also appear in the Microsoft Office Binder, and you can write code to save your document’s data in Binder data files.

With Internet Explorer 3.0 or later, you can also save properties of your ActiveX document by writing to and reading from the document's data file.

You can package ActiveX documents in either in-process or out-of-process components.

"Creating an ActiveX Document" is a step-by-step introduction to creating ActiveX documents.

For More Information   ActiveX document design is covered in detail in "Building ActiveX Documents." You can find out more about how to use documents in your Internet applications in the Building Internet Applications section of the Component Tools Guide. Topics of general interest to component designers can be found in "General Principles of Component Design" and "Debugging, Testing, and Deploying Components."