Excel 2016 Power Programming with VBA

10 Interacting with Other Applications

In This Chapter

• Understanding Microsoft Office automation
• Automating Access from Excel
• Automating Word from Excel
• Automating PowerPoint from Excel
• Automating Outlook from Excel
• Starting other applications from Excel

Understanding Microsoft Office Automation

Through this book, you’ve discovered how to leverage VBA to automate tasks, processes, and program flow. In this chapter, automation will take on a different meaning. Automation here will define the means of manipulating or controlling one application with another.

Why would you even want to control one application with another? Data-oriented processes quite often involve a succession of applications. It’s not uncommon to see data being analyzed and aggregated in Excel, used in a PowerPoint presentation, and then emailed via Outlook.

The reality is that each Microsoft Office application has strengths that you routinely leverage through manual processes. With VBA, you can go further and automate the interactions between Excel and other Office applications.

Understanding the concept of binding

Each program in the Microsoft Office suite comes with its own Object Library. As you know, the Object Library is a kind of encyclopedia of all the objects, methods, and properties available in each Office application. Excel has its own object library, just as all the other Office applications have their own object library.

In order for Excel to be able to speak to another Office program, you ...