Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

Chapter 15. Working with Office Applications

You can design complete applications within Microsoft Access and never have the need for another Microsoft Office program. After all, you can use Access forms to enter data, Access reports to print data, and the SendObject method to send Access information via e-mail. However, it's also possible that you'll want to utilize some of the other Office programs to enhance your applications. For example, you might want to use Outlook to generate a custom form with information from an Access table. If you allow users to export some data to Excel, they can further manipulate the data without causing any unwanted interaction with your application. Exporting information to Microsoft Word gives users the ability to add their own text, perform mail merges, and e-mail information to others in an easy-to-use format.

We'll cover all of these examples and more in this chapter. There aren't many new concepts introduced in this chapter, just examples and code. Along the way we'll try to provide as many real-world situations as we can so you can truly understand how the interaction with other Office programs can enhance your application.