Access.2007.VBA.Bibl..

O

ffice 2000 introduced COM add-ins as a new development tool, an

alternative to creating VBA add-ins for Access, Excel, Outlook, and

Word. A COM add-in is created as a Dynamic Link Library (DLL)

that is registered to work with Office applications. COM add-ins (at least the-

oretically) can be written to work with multiple Office programs, though

realistically, because of the differences in functionality between Access, Word,

Outlook, and Excel, only very simple COM add-ins of the “Hello, World!”

type can actually be designed to work across multiple Office applications.

If you bought the Developer Edition of Office 2000 (or later, Office XP) you

could create COM add-ins in the Access Visual Basic window, using its sup-

port for opening and editing VBA projects, although it wasn’t easy because of

the lack of debugging support. There was no Developer Edition of Office

2003, and there is none for Office 2007, so that option is no longer viable,

unless you still have the Developer Edition of Office 2000 or Office XP

installed.

Visual Studio Tools for Office lets you create Visual Studio

add-ins for some Office components, but unfortunately,

even the latest edition, the one that supports Office 2007, still lacks support

for creating Access add-ins. See Chapter 16 for a discussion of creating Visual

Studio add-ins for working with the Access 2007 Ribbon.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t create COM add-ins for Office 2007.

Visual Basic was last updated in 1998 (v. 6.0), but it is still quite useful, and

is fully supported by Microsoft, unlike most other Microsoft applications of

that vintage. If you have been working with VB 6 for years, you don’t have to

put aside your hard-won expertise and start learning Visual Studio 2005;

you can create COM add-ins that will work in Office 2007 using VB 6.

(If you do want to learn how to create add-ins with Visual Studio 2005,

see Chapter 16.)

CROSS-REFCROSS-REF

IN THIS CHAPTER

Creating COM add-ins with

Visual Basic 6

Installing and troubleshooting

COM add-ins

Comparing COM add-ins and

Access add-ins

Creating COM Add-ins

with Visual Basic 6