Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

API Resources

In order to call functions in the Windows API, or any API for that matter, you'll need documentation describing the available functions, how to declare them in VBA, and how to call them. Two helpful resources are:

• The Win32API.txt file included in Microsoft Office 2000 Developer and in Microsoft Visual Basic. The Win32API.txt file contains VBA Declare statements for most of the functions in the Windows API. You can use the API Viewer add-in that's also included in Office 2000 Developer to locate and copy the Declare statement that you need. For information about installing and using the API Viewer add-in, see the apiload.txt file that's included with Office 2000 Developer. The API Viewer application that's included with Microsoft Visual Basic provides the same functionality, except that it's a stand-alone application.

  The first time you run the API Viewer application, it loads the Win32API.txt file. This text file can be exported to a Microsoft Access database (.mdb file), which speeds the process of loading and scrolling the API data. The Office 2000 Developer CD-ROM includes a custom version of the exported database, OPG_Win32API.mdb, available in the ODETools\V9\Samples\OPG\Samples\CH10 subfolder. This database contains forms and queries you can use to search for API functions containing particular keywords.

• The Microsoft Platform SDK, which contains complete documentation for the Windows API. It is available free of charge on the Microsoft Developer Network site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/developer/.

For other sources of information about the Windows API and other APIs published by Microsoft, see "Where to Go from Here" at the end of this chapter.