Title: Office 2000 Issue: Spectrum Sept/Oct '99 Author: Nathan Rector Company: Natec Systems Email: nater@northcoast.com http: www.northcoast.com/~nater/ A few months ago, Microsoft released their Office 2000. So in following with my articles on VBA from the last few months and the current ton of articles that everyone else in world is writing about Office 2000, I'm going to talk about it here. In general, the changes done in Office 2000 are Microsoft's second try at controlling how the desktop will use Internet and Intranets, and which applications the user will use to access the Internet and Intranet. Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook all have features that allow the users to save their files in an HTML format. Word 2000 allows the user to save their documents as HTML pages. Excel 2000 will convert their spreadsheets and graphs into a Web format. Users can enter and edit data in Access using HTML forms, and display reports in HTML format. With Outlook, the user can add there calendar and to do list to a Web sever to be accessed from any location with a web browser. Office 2000 even allows users and developers to place VBscript in their documents to create Active Server Pages (ASP). With a little help from Web servers with Office Extentions, Office 2000 could use the web site as a kind of file server and even allow the users to edit the and change specific information on the Web page if they are use IE 5. Excel has some additional features that make Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) easier. The OLAP tools let users analyze data in different ways than simply comparing columns to rows. For example, OLAP lets you do trend analysis by projecting data patterns into the future. An OLAP server sits between a client and the database server--where the data itself lives. Now, Excel can be used to do OLAP-style analysis by feeding OLAP data into Excel PivotTables. They have also done some changes in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) that gives the developer better tools for controlling the application. For example, Word has several new Events that the developer can use to manipulate the Document: DocumentBeforeClose - Event is fired before a document is closed DocumentBeforePrint - Event is fired before a document is printed DocumentBeforeSave - Event is fired before a document is saved DocumentChange - Event is fired when a document is changes on some way DocumentOpen - Event is fired when a document opens NewDocument - Event is fired when a new document is created Quit - Event is fired when Word Exits WindowActivate - Event is fired when a Document window becomes active WindowBeforeDoubleClick - Event is fired when a user Double Clicks WindowBeforeRightClick - Event is fired when a user Right clicks WindowDeactivate - Event is fired when a document window becomes deactivated Office 2000 also has a few new objects added that help the developer control the new features supplied with Office: HTMLProject - Represents a top-level project branch, as in the Project Explorer or the Microsoft Script Editor Since Office 2000 can save information in HTML, it has been setup to so it can keep track of what is called a project. This project will hold all the HTML, graphics and any script information. LauguageSettings - Returns information about the language settings in a Microsoft Office application. With this object, the developer can find out what lauguage the user is using. This is useful if developer is creating applications for international users and they want to display different messages for different people, or process functions differently. Script - Represents a block of HTML script in a Microsoft Word document, on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or on a Microsoft PowerPoint slide. This object allows the developer to add VBScript into a word document or Excel spreadsheet using a Macro. This can is helpful if the developer is created the document on the fly using VBA and a database and wish to save the end result as a Web page. For the most part, nothing has really changed for the developer with the new version of Office. Even with the new objects which would only like be used in special instances, everything you did in Office 97 will work in Office 2000 from what I've seen. You can still create custom menus to add to the toolbar, as well as remove items from the existing menus to restrict access to items. You can still make the those nifty specialized toolbars that keep the commonly used commands that you want the user to use in front of them, although Office now has a version of this built into it. The most striking feature of Office is the ablility to create HTML documents from existing Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint files. Now a developer can use existing Multivalue BASIC programs that work with the ever present Windows Terminal Emulators like ViaDuct, AccuTerm, and wIntegerate that create Word documents or Excel spreadsheets and make them HTML pages. Title: Office 2000 Issue: Spectrum Sept/Oct '99 Author: Nathan Rector Company: Natec Systems Email: nater@northcoast.com http: www.northcoast.com/~nater/ A few months ago, Microsoft released their Office 2000. So in following with my articles on VBA from the last few months and the current ton of articles that everyone else in world is writing about Office 2000, I'm going to talk about it here. In general, the changes done in Office 2000 are Microsoft's second try at controlling how the desktop will use Internet and Intranets, and which applications the user will use to access the Internet and Intranet. Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook all have features that allow the users to save their files in an HTML format. Word 2000 allows the user to save their documents as HTML pages. Excel 2000 will convert their spreadsheets and graphs into a Web format. Users can enter and edit data in Access using HTML forms, and display reports in HTML format. With Outlook, the user can add there calendar and to do list to a Web sever to be accessed from any location with a web browser. Office 2000 even allows users and developers to place VBscript in their documents to create Active Server Pages (ASP). With a little help from Web servers with Office Extentions, Office 2000 could use the web site as a kind of file server and even allow the users to edit the and change specific information on the Web page if they are use IE 5. Excel has some additional features that make Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) easier. The OLAP tools let users analyze data in different ways than simply comparing columns to rows. For example, OLAP lets you do trend analysis by projecting data patterns into the future. An OLAP server sits between a client and the database server--where the data itself lives. Now, Excel can be used to do OLAP-style analysis by feeding OLAP data into Excel PivotTables. They have also done some changes in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) that gives the developer better tools for controlling the application. For example, Word has several new Events that the developer can use to manipulate the Document: DocumentBeforeClose - Event is fired before a document is closed DocumentBeforePrint - Event is fired before a document is printed DocumentBeforeSave - Event is fired before a document is saved DocumentChange - Event is fired when a document is changes on some way DocumentOpen - Event is fired when a document opens NewDocument - Event is fired when a new document is created Quit - Event is fired when Word Exits WindowActivate - Event is fired when a Document window becomes active WindowBeforeDoubleClick - Event is fired when a user Double Clicks WindowBeforeRightClick - Event is fired when a user Right clicks WindowDeactivate - Event is fired when a document window becomes deactivated Office 2000 also has a few new objects added that help the developer control the new features supplied with Office: HTMLProject - Represents a top-level project branch, as in the Project Explorer or the Microsoft Script Editor Since Office 2000 can save information in HTML, it has been setup to so it can keep track of what is called a project. This project will hold all the HTML, graphics and any script information. LauguageSettings - Returns information about the language settings in a Microsoft Office application. With this object, the developer can find out what lauguage the user is using. This is useful if developer is creating applications for international users and they want to display different messages for different people, or process functions differently. Script - Represents a block of HTML script in a Microsoft Word document, on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or on a Microsoft PowerPoint slide. This object allows the developer to add VBScript into a word document or Excel spreadsheet using a Macro. This can is helpful if the developer is created the document on the fly using VBA and a database and wish to save the end result as a Web page. For the most part, nothing has really changed for the developer with the new version of Office. Even with the new objects which would only like be used in special instances, everything you did in Office 97 will work in Office 2000 from what I've seen. You can still create custom menus to add to the toolbar, as well as remove items from the existing menus to restrict access to items. You can still make the those nifty specialized toolbars that keep the commonly used commands that you want the user to use in front of them, although Office now has a version of this built into it. The most striking feature of Office is the ablility to create HTML documents from existing Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint files. Now a developer can use existing Multivalue BASIC programs that work with the ever present Windows Terminal Emulators like ViaDuct, AccuTerm, and wIntegerate that create Word documents or Excel spreadsheets and make them HTML pages.