Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2012 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit

Hour 22. Controlling Other Applications Using Automation

What You’ll Learn in This Hour

• Creating a reference to an automation library

• Creating an instance of an automation server

• Manipulating the objects of an automation server

• Automating Microsoft Word

• Automating Microsoft Excel

In Hour 16, “Designing Objects Using Classes,” you learned how to use classes to create objects. In that hour, I mentioned that objects could be exposed to outside applications. Excel, for example, exposes most of its functionality as a set of objects. The process of using objects from another application is called automation. The externally accessible objects of an application comprise its object model. Using automation to manipulate a program’s object model ...