Chapter 21 - Creating Your Own Add-Ins

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Add-ins are extensions to applications that provide extra functionality over and above the application’s built-in features, such as giving you a choice of formats for a control, a library of code segments, or a way of quickly renaming objects according to a naming convention. You can download Microsoft Office add-ins from the Microsoft Web site, purchase add-ins from third-party vendors, download freeware or shareware add-ins from various Web sites, or create your own add-ins for personal or corporate use.

Application-specific Access add-ins have been available since Microsoft Access 1.0. These add-ins are specifically designed to hook in to Access menus or properties or to run as wizards of various sorts, to aid in the creation of new database objects.

Office 2000 introduced a new type of add-in: COM add-ins. COM add-ins are an Office feature, and they can be written to support multiple Office applications, unlike application-specific add-ins, which run in only one application.