Office® XP Development with VBA

Objects and Components

As programs became larger and more complex, the problem of program bugs and errors became increasingly difficult to deal with. Many of these problems are the result of unintended and unexpected interactions between different parts of a program, so by decreasing or eliminating these interactions you would go a long way toward preventing errors and bugs. This was accomplished by encapsulating a program's various functions into a number of independent modules, then combining the modules to create the final program. As you may have guessed, these modules are the objects in object-oriented programming.

One of the basic ideas behind objects is that what goes on inside the object is completely hidden from the rest of the program. ...