Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft® Excel and VBA®

Chapter 21. Writing Add-ins with Visual Basic 6

Ever since VBA was added to Excel 5.0, we've been able to add features to Excel by creating add-in workbooks, as discussed in Chapter 5 — Function, General and Application-Specific Add-ins. Word, Access and PowerPoint had their own application-specific add-in architectures. In Office 2000, Microsoft created a new add-in architecture, called a COM Add-in, which was common to all the Office applications and the VBIDE. This chapter explains how to create COM Add-ins using Visual Basic 6. Chapter 22 — Using VB.NET and the Visual Studio Tools for Office explains how to achieve similar results using Visual Basic.NET.

A Hello World Add-in

At its most fundamental level, an add-in architecture has four basic ...