In today’s world of technology, it has become commonplace for companies to expect systems to communicate with each other in ways that were not possible just a decade ago. In this chapter, you explored ways to work with external data to facilitate communications between various systems. You learned VBA techniques for linking, importing, and exporting data to various sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, and text files. You also learned how to handle more advanced scenarios, such as sending e-mails programmatically with and without attachments.
Chapter 8 will build on this chapter by exploring some advanced linking and importing techniques using web services and the SharePoint product family.