Microsoft® .NET Development for Microsoft Office

Chapter 7. Office Documents and Data

Getting data into and out of Microsoft Office documents is a common business requirement. This data might come from some back-end process, one or more Web services, or a database. In some solutions, the data is generated from within the Office document—particularly when the application is Microsoft Excel—and then fed back to server-side processes or databases.

Alongside the requirement to get data into and out of Office documents is the requirement to keep that data up-to-date, preferably in real or near-real time. In the past, this has often been accomplished through the use of Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), but DDE is a technology that is not supported in Microsoft .NET, having been more or less superseded by ...