Page 471 - Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Chapter 21

Excel and Other Office

Applications

Starting Another Application. . . . . . . . . 445 Interacting with Other
Activating Another Application . . . . . . . 449 Office Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455
Binding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449€ Working with Multiple Applications
to Get the Job Done . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465

In the early days of personal computing, communication between multiple applications was
rare. The idea of sharing data between two applications meant retyping the information
required. However, with today’s technologies, communication between applications occurs
with most software, although the user usually is unaware of the communication. Thank
goodness sharing data between two applications has become as simple as a drag and
drop operation.
The Microsoft Office application programs, Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook,
and Access, all use the same Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language. Once
you understand the VBA syntax in Excel, you’ll know how to use VBA in all the other appli­
cations. Where the Office applications differ is in their individual object models.

The significant advantage about the common VBA language is that all Office applications are
able to expose their objects to each other, and you can program interaction between all the
applications from any one of them. To work with Word objects from Excel, for example, you
only need to establish a link to Word, and then you have access to its objects as if you were
programming with VBA in Word itself.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to start and activate another application from Excel. In addi­
tion, you’ll be examining how to interact with other Office files, such as using late binding
and early binding, opening a document in Word, accessing an active Word document, and
creating a new Word document. Finally, to finish the chapter, you’ll examine how to control
Excel from other Office applications.

Starting Another Application

There are times when you need to start another application from Excel. Later in this chapter,
you’ll review how to interact with other Office applications, but right now you’ll review how
to open an application that falls outside the Office application scope.

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Part 6: Excel and the Outside World: Collaborating Made Easy