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Welcome to the Microsoft® Office 2000 Developer. Office 2000 Developer provides everything for developers building solutions with Microsoft Office 2000. Office Developer includes Microsoft Office Premium (with Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook™, PowerPoint®, Access, and FrontPage®, all with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) 6.0) as well as professional productivity tools, documentation, and sample code for quickly building solutions with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office components.
Office 2000 delivers on Microsoft's vision of application programmability, enabling developer's access to a rich platform of pre-built functionality on which they can build custom solutions. Application programmability refers to the extent to which an application can be customized and integrated with other applications to deliver a seamless, tailored solution that users are immediately familiar with. Building solutions on top of productivity applications results in faster development cycles and satisfied users since organizational data can be delivered directly into productivity applications that users work with every day. Because of these benefits, more than 2.5 million developers build solutions with Microsoft Office, making it the second largest platform targeted by developers, after Microsoft Windows® itself.
For more information about Office 2000, see What's New in Office 2000 Premium.
Empowering the Office Developer Community
There are now more than 2.3 million developers who build custom solutions on the Office platform. The enhancements in Office 2000 will make the community of developers targeting Office solutions platform even larger. As more users and business decision makers realize the benefits of custom Office solutions, developers will get more requests to customize, automate, and integrate Office in their custom solutions. This will increase the demand for developers to create solutions rapidly, individually, and as a team.
Office 2000 Developer is the edition of Office dedicated to developers who work with Office as a solutions platform. In Office 2000 Developer, Microsoft delivers productivity tools, documentation, and sample code for building solutions with Microsoft Office 2000. In addition, Office 2000 Developer provides tools for accessing data more easily from a variety of sources, as well as tools for managing and deploying solutions with Office.
Build Solutions Faster
Solutions built with Microsoft Office are developed and deployed more quickly than those built from scratch. Developers can reuse the power and functionality of the host application and develop solutions with VBA, the most familiar and popular development environment in the world. Office 2000 Developer seeks to build on this promise of rapid development by providing a rich set of productivity tools that extend the power of VBA and support the developer during the process of building custom solutions with Microsoft Office.
Specifically, Office Developer is designed to maximize code reuse, support team development, and provide tools for quickly building solutions with solid code. In addition, fast development means access to pre-written code and samples to jumpstart the development process.
COM Add-in Designer allows developers to create and debug stand-alone VBA COM add-ins (DLL's) without having to leave the VBA development environment.
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe™ delivers version control and code management tools that professional developers need to manage source code in team and individual development environments.
Error Handler automates creating standardized error handler code with input dialog boxes that capture basic information and insert standardized error handling code using a customizable template.
Code Commenter creates well-commented code by automatically adding comments and headers to procedures using customizable templates.
Printed Developer Documentation includes printed copies of the and the , plus a special edition of the MSDN™ CD library that includes numerous samples.
Easy Access to Data
Connectivity to business-critical data is essential for organizations and information technology professionals who want to provide easier, timelier access to their users. Office 2000 users should be knowledge-management empowered with the data features provided in each Office application or custom solution. They should be able to locate data from any source (including large data stores in an SQL-based data warehouse) and then create knowledge by synthesizing this data into professionally published content. And each data connection should not require additional processes to maintain state for data consumers or data providers.
Office 2000 Developer, in support of knowledge management, intends to provide the means to design reliable data-centric solutions visually by abstractly connecting to data, regardless of format. And custom Office solutions should function consistently, whether they're hosted in Microsoft Visual Basic® forms, Office documents, or Web browsers. Further enhancements are intended to provide reporting capability from live data sources with a simple interface.
Office 2000 Developer delivers tools and components that make it easy to integrate data into Office solutions and publish to the Web.
Data Environment Designer allows developers to easily connect VBA code to external data sources by creating data bound forms and controls through a visual user interface.
Data Binding Collection handles the interaction between data consumers and data sources. In previous versions, the binding manager was an integral part of the form, and therefore was not exposed to the Basic developer. It is now a creatable object that facilitates binding between both visual and non-visual objects.
Data Report Designer is a versatile data report generator that allows developers to create reports from a data source. In addition to creating printable reports, you can also export the report to HTML or text files.
Web Components are a collection of COM controls for publishing spreadsheets, charts and databases to the Web, taking full advantage of the rich interactivity provided by Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 and later.
Simplify Deploying and Managing Solutions
Developers who support large organizations have often struggled with the task of deploying Office solutions, with minimal effort, across a large number of desktop machines. Complex solutions, in the past, required elaborate dependencies to function as designed. Quite often each user machine was installed with different application settings and associated system files that prevented the solution from working properly.
Office 2000 Developer was designed to simplify complete control of the deployment process, including the pre-installation of file dependencies and feature association. It was also intended to minimize the reliance on external user assistance by empowering developers to create intuitive and highly interactive user assistance within each Office application or custom solution.
Office 2000 Developer provides all of the necessary tools for easily deploying and managing solutions built with Microsoft Office.
Package and Deployment Wizard helps developers package applications for installation and deployment. The Package and Deployment Wizard guides developers through the steps of identifying dependency files for redistribution of solutions built with Office on any media as well as to the Web.
HTML Help Workshop****makes it possible to develop Help for users in the new Windows standard HTML Help format. By using the Answer Wizard Builder, it's possible for developers to allow natural language queries in their applications.
Office Assistants are fully exposed in the Office programmability model, allowing developers to include customized behavior in Office solutions with the Microsoft Agent SDK. Event-driven assistance empowers users to become productive with solution functionality in a non-obtrusive format.
Richer Exposure of the Office Architecture
Enhanced Event and Object Models
Events in Office enable developers to write code behind user interaction with the Office application. For example, developers can write code behind the "open" event of an Excel spreadsheet to pre-populate the spreadsheet with data from the enterprise sales database. Office 2000 adds a large number of events to the Office applications, providing developers with even more opportunities for customizing Office and delivering enterprise data directly to the desktop.
In addition to events, Microsoft Office 2000 exposes more than 600 programmable objects to developers via COM, representing millions of lines of code all written and tested by Microsoft developers. These objects (the spell checker in Word, the report engine in Access, and so on) are exposed via the application object model so developers can reuse that functionality in their own custom solutions.
Office 2000 also provides componentized versions of the interactive feature set of Excel through Office Web Components. These optimized and function-rich COM controls, for publishing spreadsheets, charts, and databases to the Web, take full advantage of the rich interactivity provided by Internet Explorer 4.01 and later.
Visual Basic for Applications 6.0
The latest version of VBA is integrated with Office 2000, available from each application in the suite, including FrontPage and Outlook. VBA is the development environment and language of Microsoft Office applications, as well as in third parties that license the VBA technology. Developers can integrate multiple "VBA enabled" applications to create seamless solutions that span the entire line of business applications.
Simplified, Consistent Add-in Model Based on COM
Developers can create integrated Office solutions, using COM add-ins with the new unified add-in model, that provide complex functionality in a small, high-performance package. For the first time, developers can build a single code base that can be run by all the Office applications at startup. For example, a developer could build a COM add-in for all Office applications that enable users to insert customer information directly from a central, enterprise database, thereby reducing inconsistencies and ensuring up-to-date information is used for creating all content.
Microsoft Office Anti-Virus API
This new API enables integration of third party anti-virus applications to interrogate Office solutions against known document viruses.
Digital Signing of VBA Projects
Developers can now digitally sign their solutions built with Microsoft Office 2000. With Digital Signatures, users can maintain a database of trusted sources and be notified when unknown authors have written code behind an application document, spreadsheet, or presentation.
Web Integration
HTML Rendering
Office 2000 documents support both standard binary file formats as well as HTML, with equal fidelity. With Office 2000, documents created in productivity applications are Web documents.
Dynamic HTML Page Creation
Microsoft Script Editor is included to develop HTML scripts and HTML-based client solutions that take advantage of the Document Object Model (DOM).
Integration with FrontPage 2000
Programmable access to Microsoft FrontPage Web site creation and management tool functions makes it easy to create consistent-looking Web pages from Office 2000 applications.
Office Server Extensions
This new server-side extension to the Office client enables Publishing, Web Discussions, and Notification/Subscriptions functions from native Office 2000 documents and HTML files. Each function can be programmatically added either through an Office solution or through the browser using a special toolbar supplied by Office Server Extensions.