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Using Web Technologies with Office XP

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The applications in the Microsoft® Office suite always have focused on making it easy to create powerful documents. However, these documents have not always been that easy to share with large groups of people. In the last few years, the popularity of the Internet and corporate intranets has exploded because they make it so easy to disseminate information to a wide audience. As a result, Office XP has been designed to seamlessly integrate Office desktop productivity with the ability of the Internet and corporate intranets to share information.

The Web technologies integrated into Office XP give developers like you a host of new features you can use to create custom applications that take full advantage of Web-based information sharing and collaboration. You can think of Office XP as an easily accessible set of Web-publishing tools that make it possible for users to manage information instead of documents.

The document object model that lies behind Web pages, scripting in Office documents, and the new Microsoft Script Editor can help you make use of these Web technologies. In addition, you can use Dynamic HTML (DHTML), cascading style sheets, and other tools and techniques to create powerful Office documents for the Web.

Along with these features, you will want to know how to use two Web-related features of Office XP: Microsoft Office Web Components and Microsoft Office Web Discussions Client. The Office Web Components make it easy to create Web pages that let users view and manipulate data in ways never before possible, and Microsoft Office Web Discussions Client make it possible for users to create threaded discussions associated with Web pages and Office documents.

Obviously, there is much to learn when it comes to Web technologies, and the material listed in the table below is only a beginning. Starting with what you know about Office and Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA), this material helps you apply your existing knowledge in ways that will make you immediately productive. If you have already created Web-based applications, some of the material might already be familiar to you, so you might want to go directly to the discussions about the Office Web Components and Office Web Discussions Client.

In This Section

  • Understanding HTML Elements
    Even if you are an experienced Microsoft® Office and Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) developer, you might approach this subject with a little apprehension.
  • Working with the Office Web Components
    Microsoft® Office XP applications support HTML code as a native file format, making all Office documents "Web-ready" by default.
  • Working with Office Web Discussions Client
    You use the Microsoft Office Web Discussions Client object library to work with discussion servers or discussions on a page programmatically.
  • Working with the Exchange Web Store
    Web Store is a database technology that you can use to store, share, and manage heterogeneous data, such as e-mail messages, Web pages, multimedia files, and Microsoft® Office documents.
  • Working with Data Access Pages
    Data access pages make it possible for you to create data entry pages as HTML forms in Microsoft® Access and publish them to a Web site. For example, data access pages can be used in workflow applications to make it possible for users to view and update data directly in the database.
  • Working with Smart Tags
    Using Smart Tags, you can automate user interaction with text in a document based on the value of the text string. For example, the name of an employee can be automated to provide a menu list that makes it possible for a user to compose an e-mail message to that person, display an organization chart showing that person, or link to the employee's Web page.
  • Getting Started with Office Developer
    Microsoft® Office XP Developer provides everything for developers building applications with Office XP. Office Developer includes professional productivity tools, documentation, and sample code for quickly building, managing, and deploying applications with Office and Office components.
  • Developing Office Developer Applications
    Microsoft® Office XP Developer provides the productivity tools professional developers must have to build applications faster, integration tools to make their applications work seamlessly with data and the Web, and management tools to simplify deploying and managing the applications they build with Office.
  • Programming Concepts
    When you program, you store data and manipulate it with a series of instructions. The data and data storage containers are the raw materials of programming.