Excel 2003 Programming: A Developers Notebook (Developers Notebook)

1.9. What Next?

Using Excel and InfoPath together takes you full circle through lists, SharePoint, XML, web services, security, and .NET. I hope these examples gave you a good idea of what these features have in common, how they can be used together, and how they might be useful to you.

There are a couple of points I want you to take away from this experience:

• If you don't know XML, learning it will help your career as a programmer.

• Ditto for .NET.

There is still a great deal that can be done with VBA and non-XML approaches to sharing data in Excel, but XML and .NET are the next wave. Ignore it at your own risk.

I didn't give much detail on the how or why of any of these kick-start tutorials. Rest assured, I offer much more detail in the following chapters. My goal here is to help you decide if this approach is right for you, and (hopefully) get you a little excited about it.