Chapter 5: Writing Applications Using VBA

Overview

Many people associate Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) with Microsoft Office. While it's true that Microsoft Office does rely on VBA as a development language, you'll find VBA used with other applications too. Microsoft provides a list of companies that have licensed VBA at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vba/companies/company.asp. (Make sure you read the "Other Companies That Use VBA" sidebar for additional ideas too.) Therefore, even though the examples in this chapter do rely on Microsoft products, you can use the information it contains with any product that supports VBA.

This chapter explores methods of coupling Google Web Services to an application with VBA capability. You can use Google Web Services to meet a number of needs. For example, you can track the ranking of your Web site given certain search words and then use Excel to analyze your keyword usage. Likewise, you can obtain information from Google Web Services to create a report in Word. You might use such a report to help management understand the current resources available on a particular subject ”perhaps a new area the company plans to target for business.

Unfortunately, one chapter can't do everything that you normally find in a whole book. You won't learn how to use VBA in this chapter, and I'm assuming you know how to use the application in question. The chapter doesn't leave you completely in the dark, however. The "Resources for Learning VBA" section contains information on where you can learn more about VBA. Knowing how to use VBA is a prerequisite for this chapter.

All of the examples in this chapter rely on the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit. You can download this toolkit at http://msdn.microsoft.com/nhp/default.asp?contentid=28000523. The examples all rely on the 3.0 version of the toolkit ”the latest version available at the time of writing. Office 2003 applications could also rely on their built-in features to perform the SOAP requests . Experimentation shows that using the built-in features is actually a lot harder than using the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit, so this book concentrates on the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit techniques.