Chapter 21: Excel and Other Office Applications

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Overview

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 applications. 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 addition, 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.

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