Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Which Technologies Should You Use?

The first critical design decisions that you need to make are what type of solution you want to create and which application or technologies to use as the basis for your solution. Solutions you create with Office 2000 are likely to fall into one of the following broad categories: data-management applications; document templates; add-ins; and Web applications, either with or without a data-management component.

Each of the Office 2000 applications is better suited to some solutions than to others, and deciding which to use requires some familiarity with the strengths and weaknesses of all of them. One of the goals of this book is to help you become familiar with applications and technologies that you may not have known much about before so that you can use the right tools for the solution. The following sections, as well as later chapters, aim to help you navigate through the possibilities in order to choose the best technologies for your solution.