Windows Applications and Drag and Drop -- Dobjview

I tested EX26B with the Microsoft Office 97 suite. I tried both drag-and-drop and clipboard transfers, with the results shown in the following table.

EX26B	Word	Excel	PowerPoint
Sends clipboard data to	x	x (no palettes)	x
Accepts clipboard data from
Sends drag-drop data to	x		x
Accepts drag-drop data from

When I started to investigate why these programs were so uncooperative, I discovered a useful OLE utility called Dobjview (IDataObject viewer). I could use Dobjview to examine a data object on the clipboard, and I could drag objects to the Dobjview window. Here's what I got when I dragged a picture from Microsoft Excel.

No CF_DIB format is present. If you want pictures from Excel, you must enhance EX26B to process metafiles. Another alternative is to rewrite the program with compound document support as described in Chapter 28. The OLE libraries contain code to display bitmaps and metafiles.