Microsoft Office

Office itself is a very important resource for Office Compatible developers, since it offers a wide range of features which they can access when Office is on the desktop. In general, products can use Office's OLE Automation object model or VBA to access Office, as described in numerous Microsoft Press books (see Design Guides & Technical References). In fact, Office is now so widespread that many developers assume it will be present on the desktop when their product is installed. By relying on it as an almost universally available source of important technology (and data), they eliminate the need to create some features from scratch and they focus instead on bringing new features to the desktop.