Office XP Becomes a Stronger Development Platform

Although Office XP has only begun to ignite the interest of end users, it provides dozens of improvements for developers who use Office as a platform for custom applications. Three of the more important improvements give developers ways to exert greater control during document creation, make Office a player in the world of Web services, and make Excel applications better sources for Internet data. Developers might have trouble selling the need for these new capabilities because the benefits are largely hidden from end users, but in many cases they will prove worthwhile. Some new features position Office XP as an especially useful front-end to .NET Web services.

Even in organizations that implement a partial Office XP rollout, smart planning will allow developers to reap benefits in environments that mix Office XP with earlier Office versions.

Office Development Tools

Beginning with Office 97, every edition of Office has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming platform for building additional capabilities on top of Office’s out-of-the-box applications. These custom-built capabilities can range from simple macro routines added to individual Office applications (such as a routine to validate a telephone number entered into an Access database) to complex enterprise-wide solutions that dramatically alter the functioning of the entire Office suite (such as workflow functions that control the routing and updating of documents in an insurance claims office). Developers build these applications with code components called “object models,” which define the “objects” that VBA programs can interact with to control Office features. (For more information, see the sidebar “What Is VBA?“.) Many changes in Office XP are changes to the object models that allow VBA programs to automatically invoke functions that previously were only manually invoked by users.