Word 97—Programmability

Object Model

Word has an Object Model

For the first time, Word has an object model. This makes Word programmable from other applications using OLE automation, and exposes a great programmatic interface to Word users directly within VBA.

Extensive and Comprehensive Object Model

Word has an extensive Object Model that is designed to give access to Word’s feature set and to provide an extremely high degree of backward compatibility. Features that required programmers to access dialogs can now be accessed directly using the comprehensive Object Model.

Shared Object Model across Office Applications

Office 97 ships with a complete set of Object Models that are designed to look and feel alike, share the same naming conventions and overall structure, and make it easy for a developer to migrate code between Office applications. By using shared components in each application, there is also a shared Object Model for that component. This shared object model may be extended in an application-specific way by the host, but the core object model features exist in all applications. Examples of shared components which have a common object model include:

• Office Art, the shared drawing layer – Office Art provides approximately 50 drawing objects to the object models of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. All the important scenarios related to inserting these objects and manipulating them can be accomplished with identical code in each host application. Each host has also extended the Office Art feature set to provide application-specific features, which are only exposed in the object model in that specific host. For example, a macro which inserts a company logo into a document can be easily reused in multiple Office 97 applications.

• Assistant – The new Office assistant works in a consistent way across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, and can be controlled programmatically from any host. Identical code to control the assistant runs in each host. For example, a corporate client (or ISV) could build Add-In or feature-specific assistance into an Office application in a consistent way.

• FindFile & FileSearch – Office 97 comes with a very powerful and flexible indexing and search engine. This engine can be used directly from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access and has a consistent object model implementation in all hosts. For example, code which is used in any Office application to search for documents which match specific criteria can be easily reused in other applications.

• Hyperlinks – The hyperlink object model allows developers to add a hyperlink to the contents of a document. There is an extensive object model which covers all the key scenarios. Since there is a shared implementation of hyperlinks, there is also a shared object model

• CommandBars, the new menus and toolbars – Office now has shared code for all its menus and toolbars, and also exposes a consistent object model in each host to customize the menus and toolbars of any Office application. For example, adding a customer-specific (or user-specific) toolbar or menu to all Office applications is facilitated by the shared object model.

• Visual Basic Editor related object models – All the object models in the Visual Basic Editor are shared by all the Office hosts, so there is now a consistent way to programmatically control the Visual Basic customization in any document. The shared object models include the Visual Basic Editor environment and the UserForms component object model. For example, writing a macro which finds references to a specific Form in a VBA project, and replaces it with a reference to a different form is very easily accomplished with host application-independent code.

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