1.4 Where do you go from here?

Where do you go from here?

The remaining chapters in Section I take a look at the Office servers generally and at VFP s commands and functions for writing Automation code. Chapter 2 shows how to explore the Office servers to find out what they can do and how they do it. Chapter 3, "Visual FoxPro as an Automation Client," examines FoxPro s role as an Automation client.

Sections II through V each focus on one of the Office applications. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have a lot in common, so those three sections are structured in a fairly similar manner, each starting with a "Basics" chapter and then branching out into more advanced topics for that application. Outlook has its own outlook on the world. (We don t discuss Access in this book because automating Access from Visual FoxPro didn t seem like a pressing need, though it is possible.)

It s also important to realize that to automate any application, you must first be familiar with that application. This book does explain how various features of the Office applications work before showing how to automate them, but it also assumes that you ve used them before. If you ve never opened PowerPoint and worked with it interactively, you ll find Section IV pretty tough going, for example. Spend some time as an end user before you try to program it. We ll return to this theme over and over because it s an important one.

Section VI covers an assortment of advanced topics. First, we look at the construction of documents involving multiple Office servers, including tasks like putting charts from Excel into PowerPoint presentations or Word documents. Chapter 14 covers handling Automation errors. Your existing error handler probably can t manage these for you because they don t happen inside FoxPro. Finally, in Chapter 15, "Wrapping Up the Servers," we show why it s a good idea to write wrapper classes for the Automation servers among other things, it protects you when a new version of Office changes the Automation interface.

Copyright 2000 by Tamar E. Granor and Della Martin All Rights Reserved