Office 2003 has been enhanced to improve development and integration with Visual Basic business applications. And that's what this book is all about: providing a set of real-world, VB-oriented business applications that utilize, customize, and extend Microsoft Office applications! From presentation and document generators, to a budget consolidator and a timesheet system, this book is packed with applications to improve your productivity.

This book is not merely a reference for the Office development platform. Instead, it is about building useful applications with the Office platform and solving specific business problems. The code and sample applications remain the focus, though key transferable programming skills will be highlighted at each stage. Throughout the book, author Ty Anderson demonstrates a variety of approaches from cutting-edge to more traditional. This includes:

Each chapter presents a separate, fully-functioning application that is ready for use (or can be easily adapted to suit your own business requirements). So if you are a Visual Basic developer (6.0 or .NET) interested in building business applications with Office 2003, this book will provide exactly the skills you need.

What you’ll learn

• Enabling cross-platform collaboration with XML, web services, and InfoPath
• Creating a streamlined process workflow with smart tags and the Information Bridge Framework
• Writing .NET code behind Excel applications using Visual Studio Tools for Office
• Automating common Office tasks with VBA and COM add-ins