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Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook
book

Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

by Jeff Webb
August 2004
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
312 pages
8h 30m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

How the Pieces Fit

The preceding analogy isn’t as silly as it looks. To break it down a bit, consider the pieces that make up the new Excel features:

Note

Things that make life easier for some often make things more complicated for someone else (in this case, us). Understanding XML and its related standards is a major undertaking. Fortunately, Office often lets you take a high-level view.

  • Workspaces and lists are documents and document fragments that you create in Excel and share through SharePoint services.

  • Lists exist as XML data which is imported or exported through Excel.

  • These pieces all interoperate by means of web services.

  • Finally, InfoPath is the form engine that collects data and stores it as XML.

Figure 1-2 illustrates how these pieces fit together. The XML flowing between each piece is called a data stream . Figure 1-1 is not really off the mark.

XML-based features cooperate behind the scenes

Figure 1-2. XML-based features cooperate behind the scenes

Underlying this interaction are two pieces that I don’t know how to fit into Figure 1-2 legibly:

Note

If you explore a SharePoint server, you won’t find any list, workspace, or even XML “files” - it’s all stored in SQL! In fact, that’s the way the next generation of Windows works; Longhorn is backed by SQL.

  • You can program Excel and these other components using Visual Basic .NET. You can still use VBA in Excel, but VB.NET provides a better programming platform ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007671Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata