Excel VBA 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition

Lesson 29Overview of Office Automation from Excel

As you may recall from Lesson 1, Visual Basic for Applications is a programming language created by Microsoft to automate operations in applications that support it, such as Excel. VBA is also the language that manipulates Microsoft Office applications in Access, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. So far, the focus of this book has been on running VBA from Excel, for the purpose of acting directly upon Excel in some way.

This section shows how to control other Office applications from Excel, using the same VBA programming language with which you are now familiar, but using a different set of methods and statements with which those other Office applications are familiar. The reasons for interacting with other Office applications might not be for the purpose of changing your Excel workbook application, but they will always be for the purpose of making your workbook projects more robust, versatile, and easier to use when the situation calls for it.

Why Automate Another Application?

In the dawn of this modern era of personal computers, it was rare that two or more separate applications were able to communicate with each other. For two applications to share the same information, you usually had to retype the information manually into the other application that needed it. Today, thanks to the advances of drag and drop, and copy and paste, it has become a simple matter to share data across many applications.

The business of Excel is ...