Microsoft Agent ActiveX Control vs. the Office Assistant

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The Office Assistant is based on the Microsoft Agent ActiveX control. Many of the Agent control's methods and properties are exposed through the Assistant's object model. You can use the Agent control in Microsoft® Office applications, on Web pages, or in any environment that supports Microsoft® ActiveX® controls.

There are some circumstances where you would use the Agent control instead of the Assistant object to provide Office Assistant services:

You want to use features of the Agent that are available only through the control — for example, the Agent's speech-recognition capabilities.

You want to use the Agent control in an Office application where the Assistant object is not available. For example, if you have an Access run-time application on a machine that does not have Office installed, you can use the Agent control to provide the full range of Assistant services without accessing the Assistant's object model.

You want to use the Agent to provide Assistant-like services on a Web page. The Agent control is added to HTML pages by using the <OBJECT> tag and is manipulated by using script.

See Also

Working with Shared Office Components | Working with the Office Assistant | Programming the Office Assistant | Working with Balloon Objects | Using Balloon Controls | Modeless Balloons and the Callback Property