Congratulations! If you’re reading this foreword, you’re either using, or considering using, Microsoft® Office 2000 as a part of a custom solution. Either way, the book you hold in your hands is the best available resource for learning how to exploit the programmability features of Office 2000.

Over 2.6 million developers currently use Office as a part of the custom solutions they build. Why are so many developers building solutions with Office? For starters, Office can now be found on over 40 million end users’ desktops. Developers have also long recognized that Office exposes hundreds of reusable objects that can be programmatically automated and integrated in order to create custom solutions. Furthermore, developers know that they can save time and effort by taking advantage of the prebuilt objects, functionality, and services provided by the Office applications.

With the Office 2000 release, Microsoft has worked hard to simplify the process of customizing and automating Office. By exposing all of the Office applications’ functionality through Component Object Model (COM)-compliant objects and integrating Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) throughout Office, we have made it easier than ever to develop solutions with Office. Having a consistent development language and environment greatly simplifies the developer’s efforts in building solutions and working with the objects and services Office exposes. However, the major challenge of developing solutions generally revolves around knowing which objects to instantiate, which properties to set, and the appropriate and available methods to call. With over 600 programmable objects exposed to the developer, Office provides incredible flexibility, but there needs to be some way of identifying the appropriate objects, knowing the most efficient way to access them, and the syntax required for developing solutions with them. That’s where this book comes in.

The Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide is intended specifically to help VBA developers take advantage of the applications and components in the Office suite. This book was designed from the ground up to be a comprehensive and accurate guide to building custom solutions that profit from the powerful technologies available in Office. The authors assume you know the basics of VBA and understand something about what it means to work with Office objects, object models, and components. There is no fluff or filler here. This is not a user’s guide. This is a "roll up your sleeves and get productive quickly" resource that will help you build your custom Office solutions. The Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide was written by a team of experienced and talented writers and developers who have worked closely with the Office 2000 team throughout the entire development cycle. That experience and knowledge has been included here in the form of insights, tips, tricks, and sample code that will make you immediately productive.

If you have already worked with Office 2000, you know that it contains much that is new and exciting for developers. With VBA now in every application, direct access to SQL Server databases from Microsoft Access, support for ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO), and tight integration with the Web, Office 2000 gives you more ways of customizing Office to meet specific customer needs, and this guide will show you how to take advantage of these new features and technologies in your custom solutions.

So whether you’ve been developing solutions with Office for years or are just now starting, by opening this book you’ve taken the most important first step in capitalizing on everything that Office 2000 has to offer developers. The Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide is truly the "developer’s owner’s manual" to Office 2000.