As an Office developer, you will find that Microsoft Excel 97 is a major upgrade of the product, with a greatly enhanced development environment. Starting with the introduction of Visual Basic for Applications version 5.0 and continuing with the evolution of the object model, developers will find any number of reasons to begin using the product as quickly as possible. Great effort has been taken to minimize the conversion effort from previous versions of Microsoft Excel.
In spite of the grand scope of the enhancements, many existing Microsoft Excel 95 applications will work without conversion in Microsoft Excel 97. In most instances, the newest features in Microsoft Excel have not made obsolete the functionality they replace. For example, Microsoft Excel 97 offers developers Visual Basic forms with which to construct custom dialogs. However the dialog sheets introduced in Microsoft Excel 5.0 will still work, and for that matter, the dialog tables used through Microsoft Excel 4.0 will also work. This chapter provides you with both a conversion guide and a reference document.
Note
Not all of the new functionality of Microsoft Excel 97 will be covered here, only the areas of concern to Office developers who are interested in getting their applications running in Microsoft Excel 97.
A few of the major new features in Microsoft Excel will be briefly mentioned here, but you should remember that we are offering a number of resources to help you make the transition to Office 97. Some of these include: