Next Steps for Working with Automation in Microsoft Office

Once you’ve mastered the basics in this primer, you’re likely to find more complex VBA to be quite easy. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft provides the MSDN Library, a free online resource, where you can find instructions and samples for quite a bit of VBA code.

Are you thinking, perhaps, that you might want to go even further? Now that you’re writing macros, can VBA take you far enough, or does your work warrant a foray into professional development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio?

Tristan Davis, a program manager on the 2007 Office release product team and programmability guru, has this to say about how to set the goals that are right for you when it comes to automating Microsoft Office.

“There are three big steps I see in working programmatically with Office:

• First, people typically get into recording macros to automate their own common tasks, which ends up being a huge time saver when they find out they can do XYZ once and have it automatically repeated when they press a key combination. Relatively easy to do, but not a lot of power.

• Then, you can graduate to VBA. Usually, you want to change a macro you’ve recorded and somehow end up in the Visual Basic Editor to do it, ushering you into that new world. A lot more power once you figure it out, but more complex.

• Then, there’s the big step up to the world of managed code: You’re into Microsoft Visual Studio now using Visual Studio Tools for Office to do it. Another leap in available functionality, but now it’s ‘real’ coding.”

Tristan adds the graphs on the next page, to help you look at the cost/benefit of automating Microsoft Office from two perspectives.

Before you go, however, the next chapter in this book provides a similar primer on the basics of using the Open XML Formats to edit documents, binding data to Content Controls in Word, and beginning to customize the Ribbon.