Custom Code Moves to Office 2007

Changes in Office 2007 could affect macros and other application code written for earlier versions of the Office suite. Many users and organizations have written custom code, using Microsoft programming interfaces for Office, to automate common tasks in Office applications and to integrate the suite with enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Most of this code will work on Office 2007 without change, but some will require deployment or coding changes. Therefore, developers and administrators interested in the new suite will want to take some preliminary steps to mitigate possible problems before rolling Office 2007 out.

Macros, Other Extensions Supported

Office 2007 supports all the technologies that users and developers have used to extend Office with custom code.

Most important, Office 2007 can run macros embedded in existing Office documents and templates. The suite still includes the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language and development environment for macros, and it still supports the COM APIs (called object models) that enable macros to trigger functions and trap events in applications such as Outlook and Word. VBA will not be ported to 64-bit processors, but 32-bit builds of the suite will include VBA and run on 64-bit processors.