Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath

3. Programming Excel

Ways to Customize Excel

Excel is the application most frequently programmed against in the Office family. Excel has a very rich object model, with 196 objects that combined have more than 4,500 properties and methods. It supports several models for integrating your code, including add-ins and code-behind documents. Most of these models were originally designed to allow the integration of COM components written in Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), C, or C++. Through COM interop, however, managed objects written in C# or Visual Basic can masquerade as COM objects and participate in most of these models. This chapter briefly considers several of the ways that you can integrate your code with Excel and refers ...