Chapter 1 - Introducing Automation | Microsoft Office Automation with Visual FoxPro

Chapter 1 - Introducing Automation

Automation is the latest and most successful in a series of attempts at inter-application communication. It lets one application boss another around.

Once upon a time, every application stood alone. If it needed to do something, it had to do it all by itself. There was no alternative because each application took control of the computer when it ran. That was, more or less, "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."

Since those long ago days of DOS, many schemes have been attempted to allow applications to cooperate with each other. Each successive attempt has been an improvement upon the one that preceded it. (Well, most of them have been improvements, anyway.) Automation is the latest and greatest in the never-ending quest for applications that do one thing well and communicate with other applications that do something else well.