Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide   

Building COM Add-ins for Office Applications

COM add-ins aren't difficult to create, but there are several steps involved. The following sections outline these steps.

What You Need

To create a COM add-in, you need either of the following:

Office 2000 Developer provides a template project, COM Add-In.vbp, for creating a COM add-in in Visual Basic 6.0. This template project is available in the ODETools\V9\Samples\OPG\Samples\CH11\VB_COM_AddIn subfolder on the Office 2000 Developer CD-ROM. The template project supplies the files you need to create a COM add-in, as well as the code that forms the basis of any add-in.

The COM Add-In.vbp provides you with the following:

Note   This chapter focuses on creating COM add-ins in Visual Basic 6.0. The process of creating COM add-ins in Visual Basic 5.0 or with Office 2000 Developer differs in several ways that may not be fully in this chapter. For more information about creating add-ins in Visual Basic 5.0, see the documentation for Visual Basic 5.0. For more information about creating COM add-ins with Office 2000 Developer, see Creating COM Add-Ins with Visual Basic for Applications.