Chapter 17: Access and theMicrosoft Office Environment

Overview

I am sure it will come as no surprise that there are programming common denominators shared by all the Microsoft Office programs. This makes the interconnection of these programs fairly easy. In addition to interconnecting the programs, you can also perform internal functions such as creating custom menus and toolbars.

Many of the programming features we will be looking at in this chapter can apply to the other Office programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and FrontPage. We are going to explore the objects common to Microsoft Office products, as well as ways of connecting these Office programs through VBA.

We start by looking at the objects necessary to search for a file. Then, we are going to start building a customized toolbar within Access. Finally we are going to look at some simple connections between Microsoft Access and Word, Outlook, and Excel.