| Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide | |
The applications in the Microsoft Office suite have always focused on making it easy to create powerful documents. But these documents haven't always been that easy to share with large groups of people. In the last few years, the popularity of the Internet and corporate intranets has exploded because they make it so easy to disseminate information to a wide audience. As a result, Microsoft Office 2000 has been designed to seamlessly integrate Office desktop productivity with the ability of the Internet and corporate intranets to share information.
The Web technologies integrated into Office 2000 give developers like you a host of new features you can use to create custom solutions that take full advantage of Web-based information sharing and collaboration. You can think of Office 2000 as an easily accessible set of Web-publishing tools that enable users to manage information instead of documents.
To help you make use of these Web technologies, this chapter includes an overview of the document object model that lies behind Web pages and introduces scripting in Office documents and the new Microsoft Script Editor. It also introduces Dynamic HTML (DHTML), cascading style sheets, and other tools and techniques you can use to create powerful Office documents for the Web.
Along with these features, the chapter also describes how to use two new Web-related features of Office 2000: Microsoft Office Web Components and Microsoft Office Server Extensions. The Office Web Components make it easy to create Web pages that let users view and manipulate data in ways never before possible, and Microsoft Office Server Extensions allow users to create threaded discussions associated with Web pages and Office documents.
Obviously, there is much to learn when it comes to Web technologies, and the material in this chapter is only a beginning. Starting with what you know about Office and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), this chapter helps you apply your existing knowledge in ways that will make you immediately productive. If you have already created Web-based solutions, some of what is covered in the first section of this chapter may already be familiar to you, so you may want to go directly to the sections about the Office Web Components and Office Server Extensions.
Understanding DHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and Scripting
Working with the Office Web Components