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Why This Chapter Is Important
Windows users have come to expect seamless integration between products. They are not concerned with what product you use to develop their application; they just want to accomplish their tasks. Often, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or some other product is best suited for a particular task that your application must complete. It is your responsibility to pick the best tool for the job. This means that you must know how to communicate from your application directly with that tool.All this means is that you can no longer learn only about the product and language that you select as your development tool. Instead, you must learn about all the other available applications. Furthermore, you must learn how to communicate with these applicationsa challenging but exciting feat.ActiveX automation is the capability of one application to control another application's objects. This means that your Access application can launch Excel, create or modify a spreadsheet, and print itall without the user having to directly interact with the Excel application. Many people confuse automation with the process of linking and embedding. OLE 1.0 gave you the capability to create compound documents, meaning that you can embed an Excel spreadsheet in a Word document or link to the Excel spreadsheet from within a Word document. This capability was exciting at the time, and is still quite useful in many situations, but OLE 2.0 (in addition to everything that OLE 1.0 provides) introduced the capability for one application to actually control another application's objects. With Office 97, Microsoft changed the way users refer to OLE. It became known as automation , and is an industry standard and a feature of the Component Object Model (COM) .Just as you can control other applications using automation, you can control the Access application with other applications, such as Excel or a Visual Basic application. This means that you can take advantage of Access's marvelous report writer from your Visual Basic application. In fact, you can list all the Access reports, allow your user to select one, and then run the reportall from within a Visual Basic form.
