Chapter 23. Excel, XML and Web Services

With every version of Excel since Office 97, Microsoft has gradually added features that enable Excel applications to work with Internet-based solutions. Starting with the ability to open and save HTML pages and perform rudimentary Web queries in Excel 97, this has progressed through much improved Web queries in Excel 2000, saving a workbook as XML in Excel 2002 and culminating with Excel 2003's ability to read and write arbitrary XML schemas. Along the way, Microsoft released the Web Services Toolkit, which allows our VBA code to communicate with Web services.

This chapter explains why we might want to use XML and Web services within our Excel applications, how to use them effectively in Excel 2003 and how ...

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