| Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide | |
COM add-ins are an exciting addition to Office 2000. You can create a single COM add-in that's available to any of the Office applications — Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, or FrontPage. You can also create add-ins for the Visual Basic Editor. By building COM add-ins, you can extend the functionality of your Office-based applications without adding complexity for the user.
A COM add-in is a dynamic-link library (DLL) that is specially registered so that it can be loaded by the Office 2000 applications. You can build COM add-ins with Microsoft Visual Basic version 5.0 or later, or any of the Office 2000 applications in Microsoft Office 2000 Developer. You can also create COM add-ins with Microsoft Visual C++ or Microsoft Visual J++. A discussion of these tools is beyond the scope of this book; for more information about them, see the Microsoft Developer Network Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/developer/.
Note A COM add-in can also be an ActiveX .exe file. This chapter focuses on creating COM add-ins as DLLs because they generally provide better performance than .exe files do.