Chapter 20: Interacting with Other Applications

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Overview

In This Chapter

In this chapter, I describe some of the ways in which your Excel applications can interact with other applications. Of course, I also provide several examples.

• Starting or activating another application from Excel

• Displaying Windows Control Panel dialog boxes

• Using Automation to control another application

• A simple example of using ADO to retrieve data

• Using SendKeys as a last resort

In the early days of personal computing, interapplication communication was rare. In the pre-multitasking era, users had no choice but to use one program at a time. Interapplication communication was usually limited to importing files; even copying information and pasting it into another application - something that virtually every user now takes for granted - was impossible .

Nowadays, most software is designed to support at least some type of communication with other applications. At the very least, most Windows programs support the Clipboard for copy-and-paste operations between applications. Many Windows products also support Automation.