| Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide | |
The fundamental purpose of most custom Office solutions is to turn data into usable information. This can involve working with data from a wide range of sources. The Microsoft ActiveX Database Objects (ADO) library is a new tool that developers can use to work with data. ADO is the new high-level programming interface to Microsoft's newest and most powerful data access technology, called OLE DB. It provides access to a broader variety of data sources than Microsoft Data Access Objects (DAO), although DAO is still supported and is, in some cases, the preferred way to access data programmatically. For a complete discussion of ADO and information that shows the DAO programmer how to transition to ADO, see Chapter 14, "Working with the Data Access Components of an Office Solution."
Getting at the data you need for your custom solutions is just the start of the story. Knowing how to work with data to turn it into usable information is one of the hallmarks of a successful Office developer. The Office applications now provide so many ways to retrieve data and work with data that deciding which one is the best to use can be a daunting task. There are new data access technologies and new ways to work with data once you get it into an Office application. For a discussion of what you need to know to acquire and work with data in your Office solution, see Chapter 15, "Retrieving and Analyzing Data."
Microsoft Office provides a broad array of tools and technologies for creating multiuser database solutions, and Access provides powerful new tools and features for working with Microsoft SQL Server. For information about creating multiuser database solutions by using different database architectures, see Chapter 16, "Multiuser Database Solutions."