Office 97 Developers Page

It could be said that in past releases of Microsoft Office developers were often ignored or thrown the occasional bone to keep them quiet. All this has changed with Office97.

Office97 is the most significant release yet for developers attempting to create solutions to business problems based on Microsoft Office. Office97 has improvements in many areas but let's focus specifically on what is exciting for the developer. As is always the case there are certain differences in the implementation of these features across the applications in Office97.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint

In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint the implementation of the VBE is identical while some of the object model features vary. The default macro recording language is VBA and WordBasic code is automatically converted to VBA.

Additional developer's information on Word is available.

Access

In this release Access did not get the full VBE implementation. Many features are shared with the full VBE and access has the same implementation of the VBA language.

Outlook

Outlook, Microsoft's new Personal Information Manager, does not include either VBA or the VBE. Outlook instead implements VBScript, the small portable language which was also implemented in Internet Explorer 3.0.

New Features

The new features for developers fall into three categories:

• Visual Basic Environment
• Microsoft Forms
• Language Additions