Chapter 18. Controlling Other Office Applications Excel's primary purpose is to perform calculations. It has some database-like features, but it's not a relational database. It has some text editing and formatting features, but it's not a word processor. It has presentation-quality graphics, but it's not a presentation application. It can save worksheets as Web pages, but it's not a Web authoring tool. It can send a workbook through e-mail, but it's neither an e-mail program nor personal information manager. Excel's built-in database, word processing, presentation, e-mail and Web features are sufficient for most applications, but there comes a time when we need to use a feature that is only provided by the dedicated Office applicationAccess, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook or FrontPage.This chapter explains how to control those other Office applications from within Excel, suggests some best practices to use when controlling other applications and provides an introductory overview of the major objects in each application's object model. |