Alternatives

Glossary

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• Smart tags: A technology introduced in Office XP that provide users with the ability to associate text and data with actions. Smart tags can provide actions for names, dates, times, telephone numbers, addresses, stock ticker symbols, and so on.
• Web Parts: Reusable components that contain Web-based content, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) code, HTML pages, or script. Web Parts support a set of standard properties that determine how the Web Parts are rendered in a Digital Dashboard. Microsoft Office XP Developer makes it possible for you to create and customize Digital Dashboards and Web Parts.
• Digital Dashboard: A container that provides a customized display of information consolidated from various information sources. Every Digital Dashboard is a Web page containing one or more Web Parts.

Office is itself a software platform. As mentioned earlier, you can harness all the work that the Office development team has done by building your application on top of an Office application, and then by using Component Object Model (COM) interfaces to the object model of Office applications (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook). You can also take advantage of Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications and of extensive technologies such as smart tags, Web Parts, and XML within Office applications. All of these technologies have rich multilingual support built in, so you don't have to worry about providing this.