Exchange & Outlook®: Constructing Collaborative Solutions

Office as a Report Generator

The previous section demonstrated the power of using Office documents to allow rich data entry and submission, but Microsoft Office is really designed for output. Most people use Office to create documents, so it is not surprising that the most common use of Office from your code and as part of your solutions is also to create documents.

Throughout the history of application development, the generation of reports has been a key requirement. This requirement has usually been met with a report generator tool, such as Crystal Reports; the use of the development tool's built-in report features, such as VB's Data Reports or Fox Pro's reporting tools; or (usually as a last resort, when you can't accomplish what you need ...