19.3. Scripting Programs Through Their COM Interfaces

The primary use of COM that we will look at in this chapter is the ability to use it to automate other programs. COM has long been software developers' tool of choice to provide automation interfaces to advanced users, administrators, and other programs. A software product will typically expose its application services as COM objects that can be used from any language. The best example of that are the Microsoft Office tools; all programs in the suite expose their application objects, their documents, and other services as COM objects. We can use those objects to create and manipulate documents and all sorts of data objects.

19.3.1. Automating Microsoft Word

We will be using the application ...

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