Professional Outlook® 2007 Programming

Chapter 8. Interfacing Outlook with Other Applications

In this chapter, you will learn how to interface Outlook with other applications such as Word, Excel, and Access. An Outlook programming book can't cover every application that can be interfaced with Outlook; the list includes any application that works with data and exposes an object model or can read or write data using any interface such as ADO or ADO.NET or an intermediate object such as a Web service. This chapter serves as an introduction to the topic of interfacing with other applications, a topic that merits a book of its own.

If the application you want to interface with has a macro recorder, such as Word or Excel, use the macro recorder to capture keystrokes for various actions and to create the VBA code that is the macro. This makes learning how to work with those object models easier than starting to write code from scratch.

The location used to save the templates, worksheets and databases used for the examples in this chapter is C:\Pro_Outlook. If you change the location where these files are stored, change the file paths in the code samples in this chapter to match where you saved the files. The code and templates for this chapter can be downloaded from the Wrox web site (www.wrox.com). The code files for the chapter are Chapter_8_Database.bas, Chapter_8_Excel.bas, Chapter_8_Word.bas, Chapter_8_IE.bas, and the modules for the Browser form BrowserForm.frm and BrowserForm.frx.

The examples are written to run as Outlook ...