| Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide | |
The preceding sections emphasize design considerations for solutions that store and display data, which companies commonly need. Other common solutions are those that may not involve data storage, but that help users do their jobs more efficiently. Add-ins, wizards, and templates fall into that category.
There are two types of add-ins that you can create for Office 2000 applications: Component Object Model (COM) add-ins and application-specific add-ins. COM add-ins take advantage of COM technology and can be designed to work in multiple Office 2000 applications and in the Visual Basic Editor. For example, you could create a COM add-in that displays a set of images to be inserted into a Word document, an Excel worksheet, or a PowerPoint presentation. You can build COM add-ins in Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 or 6.0, or with Microsoft Office 2000 Developer.
Application-specific add-ins, on the other hand, function only in the application in which they were created. For example, you could create an Excel add-in to perform calculations that you need to run repeatedly on different sets of data. Both types of add-ins can be integrated into the users' environment so that they become part of the application.
A wizard is a special type of add-in, and you can create a wizard as either a COM add-in or an application-specific add-in. A wizard walks a user through a process, one step at a time. The Mail Merge Helper in Word is a good example of a wizard that walks a user through a complicated process. Creating a wizard is a good way both to control how users enter information into a document and to speed up the process of formatting the document correctly.
A template forms the basis for a new document, and can contain text, graphics, predefined styles, macros, and code. Templates make it easier for users to create common documents in a standardized format. For example, you could create a Word template displaying your company's logo and address, so that all correspondence from your company has the same look.
For more information about these kinds of solutions, see Chapter 11, "Add-ins, Templates, Wizards, and Libraries."