Developing Microsoft Office Solutions: Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97

by Ken Bluttman

Build custom Microsoft Office solutions that solve real business problems--fast Now, there's a practical, easy-to-use guide for every developer and power user who wants to solve real business problems... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201738058
• ISBN13: 9780201738056
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 2.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 7.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Another Classic!

This one is clearly another must-have title for anyone using Office for developing solutions. The book provides an in-depth look at Microsoft Office features that can be reused thus avoiding re-invention of features already available to the Office user. The book is organized very intelligently and thus allows for easy reading of all the extensive features available in Office. The book is divided into 3 sections namely Office Development, Office Technologies and Case Studies and dedicates individual chapters for all of the office applications unlike other titles which seems to focus on just one application under Office.An overview of the XML Support in Word, Access and Excel is provided along with a separate chapter dedicated for XML Support in office. An indepth discussion of Infopath including Infopath forms and Infopath file types alone makes this book an invaluable resource. The case studies on XML and Infopath deserve special mention for elucidating the newer features provided in Office and how to use them for Enterprise level solutions. The samples discussed in the book are available for download from a website and most of them work without requiring any tweaks. The "Version Note" at the begining of each chapter that indicates versions of office that support theparticular features discussed in the chapter is a really nice touch!This book will be highly valuable for anyone who want to use Office Development features and even application developers who would want to enhance the existing capabilities of their applications with the plethora of Office features.All in all it is a classic and Kudos to Mr. Bluttman for a job well done. This one will find a easy to reach spot in my bookshelf.

Solution development tools and procedures

Developing Microsoft Office Solutions by computer systems expert and independent consultant Ken Bluttman comprehensively covers Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97 in its specifically designed mission to provide what developers need to know to solve practical business problems with Microsoft Office applications. Solution development tools and procedures for Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, XML, and InfoPath are deftly discussed with illustrative examples, as well as offering more detailed solution construction advice for such tasks as repurposing XML content, situations with dynamic data delivery, smart tags, and more. Case studies and examples round out this exhaustive, 586-page, highly recommended instructional resource.

Excellent resource for Visual Basic people

Whether you are using Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, or even Office 97 if you are developing solutions the connect to or enhance the products you will find a lot of valuable information in "Developing Microsoft Office Solutions". One of the more popular buzzwords these days, XML support is well covered and includes an entire chapter dedicated just to XML and Office. Each component of Office (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook) receives its own chapter each one of which follows the same format. First is a section on Objects, Properties, and Methods, then a section on Events, and finally a summary. Those who are used to working with Objects, Properties, and Methods (Visual Basic or Visual Basic for Applications) will appreciate the clear writing style and detailed explanations. There is also a chapter on InfoPath and how to use it to design forms with structured data input, which can then be easily distributed. The last part of the book contains several case studies including Mail Merge Magic, Dynamic Data Delivery, and Charting XML Data. This is not for the complete novice but anyone with a basic understanding of Visual Basic or Visual Basic for Applications should be able to create powerful solutions for their Office products."Developing Microsoft Office Solutions" is a highly recommended book for anyone with a basic understanding of Visual Basic who wants to know the nuts and bolts of creating applications or interfaces with Microsoft Office.

How to get the most out of Microsoft Office

If anybody had any doubts that Microsoft is moving towards making its Office suite more of a complete corporate business development platform, the contents of Developing Microsoft Office Solutions should convince them of how far the product has come since its days as a pure personal productivity tool.Ken Bluttman's cookbook for Microsoft Office power users and developers contains a treasure of VBA applications to exploit all versions of Microsoft Office, but especially the new or improved features in Office 2003 such as XML, smart tags and InfoPath. Being able to save files in XML format is especially interesting because it makes it easier to create web services. The book contains a good selection of applications for Excel, Word and Access. All of them, fortunately, are on the book's web site, so you can download a sample program and just change it as needed.InfoPath is completely new. It's part of the Professional Enterprise Edition and it's for "creating distributable forms". Bluttman's book contains screen shots of all the dialogs needed to design new forms, which makes it pretty straightforward to follow along. It looks as though this could be really useful in a group environment.There's a lot of information in this book, but all the samples I tried worked fine and were useful applications.

Using XML to hook to new applications?

Why did Excel outrun its competitors (remember them)? Bluttman suggests that the crucial point came in Excel 5, when you could now use Visual Basic to build quick, simple applications on top of Excel. It is along these lines that he motivates this book. What he attempts to show is how you can easily customise each of the MS Office products, through relatively straightforward programming. He systematically goes through MS Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook. For each, he gives examples of how to extend the functionality. Typically, these are done through Visual Basic. Now, VB does have its limitations. Fundamentally, it is a procedural language in which it is hard to write large programs. But it turns out that when you extend an Office product, the amount of coding is usually not that much. The basic reason is that the bulk of the complexity in what you want to do often already resides in Office. What you need customised is a few simple steps to tie various parts of [eg] your spreadsheet together.The OTHER major point of the book is how to use the new XML capabilities in Office. You can now save data in an XML format, instead of it being buried in a Microsoft proprietary binary format. What is the big deal? Well, this now opens the way to much easier integration with non-Microsoft applications. The Visual Basic customisation discussed above really only can be run on top of Office. It has a strength and a weakness. The strength is that it can let you be a consultant, say, to companies that need these customisations. (Apparently, Bluttman was quite successful at this!) But this very strength can be a weakness. Typically, those customisations are client-specific. There is little code reuse. Sure, you may be able to command a nice hourly rate. But all you can transfer between clients is your expertise. Nice, but labour intensive.By contrast, you now have a way to build a separate, full standalone application that can take advantage of Office. The use of XML for data interchange opens entirely new vistas. Given the worldwide distribution of Office, this enables a potentially enormous third party market for you, if you can implement a novel enough application with broad appeal. Maybe there is a business here for you?