Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Common Characteristics of Wizards

You can create a wizard by using any of the following:

• A Word, Excel, or PowerPoint template
  
  
• A Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access application-specific add-in
  
  
• A COM add-in for Office 2000 applications or for the Visual Basic Editor

Which you choose depends on the level of complexity of your wizard, which application or applications you want it to run in, and how you want to distribute it to your users. A template or application-specific add-in is the simplest solution. A COM add-in may be more complex because the add-in DLL and any dependent files must be properly registered on the user's computer. For more information about which to choose, see "COM Add-ins vs. Application-Specific Add-ins" earlier in this chapter.

Some other common characteristics of wizards include:

• A form or set of forms that gathers information from the user and that appears when the user launches the wizard
  
  
• Navigation buttons (such as the standard Next, Previous, Cancel, and Finish buttons) that allow the user to move back and forth between pages
  
  
• The ability to launch the wizard either from a command bar control or by creating a new document based on the wizard
  
  
• An optional special file extension

As you can see, wizards don't significantly differ from add-ins or templates.

Tip   Rather than creating a new form for each page of your wizard, you can create a multipage control on a form, with a unique control layout on each page. Then, when the user clicks the Next or Previous button, move the focus to the appropriate page. This way you don't need to recreate the form background and buttons for each page of the wizard. Also, you don't have to manage the opening and closing of multiple forms. For ideas regarding how to do this, see ListComboWiz.xla in the ODETools\V9\Samples\OPG\Samples\CH11 subfolder on the Office 2000 Developer CD-ROM.