Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA (Mr. Spreadsheets Bookshelf)
Overview
In This Chapter
In this chapter, I describe some of the ways in which your Excel applications can interact with other applications. Of course, I also provide several examples.
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Starting or activating another application from Excel
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Displaying Windows Control Panel dialog boxes
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Using Automation to control another application
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A simple example of using ADO to retrieve data
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Using SendKeys as a last resort
In the early days of personal computing, interapplication communication was rare. In the pre-multitasking era, users had no choice but to use one program at a time. Interapplication communication was usually limited to importing files; even copying information and pasting it into another application - something that virtually every user now takes for granted - was impossible .
Nowadays, most software is designed to support at least some type of communication with other applications. At the very least, most Windows programs support the Clipboard for copy-and-paste operations between applications. Many Windows products also support Automation.