Chapter 9 -- Integrating Access with Other Office Applications

Chapter 9

Microsoft Access initially gained immense popularity as a component of the Microsoft Office suite. The Access user interface shares many elements with the user interfaces of the other Office applications, and it is relatively easy to transfer data between Access and the rest of Office. In addition, you can integrate Access with the other Office components in custom applications, allowing you to provide the strengths of a database package in the familiar and friendly environment of word processors and spreadsheets.

This chapter explains how to programmatically integrate Access 2000 with the other Office applications using built-in Access features:

• Your applications can tap installable ISAM drivers through the Connection object to work with the data in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. A Connection object based on an ISAM driver can serve as a two-way data-sharing channel between Access and Excel.
• You can tap Access data sources programmatically with the Microsoft Word mail merge capability to facilitate creation of mailing labels, form letters, and product catalogs.
• Using automation, your applications can simultaneously exploit the object models from two or more Office applications. For example, an application can export names and addresses from an Access data store to a Microsoft Outlook Contacts folder. Similarly, you can populate values to tables in a Word document from an Access data source.

The samples in this chapter focus on Access, Outlook, and Word, but the general principles extend to other Office applications as well as third-party packages that expose their object models through automation and that enable manipulation using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).