Office

Class (inherits from Object)

The class that contains the enums you need for UserGuide:Office Automation Overview.

Notes

Office Automation is supported only under Windows.

The language that you use to automate Microsoft Office applications is documented by Microsoft and numerous third-party books on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Microsoft Office applications provide online help for VBA. In Office 2007, click the Microsoft Office button and then click Options. Then select Popular and select the Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon checkbox.

You will then see a Visual Basic button in the Code group in the ribbon and menubar now includes a Help menu which leads to the VB online help.

To access the online help in Office 2003, choose Macros from the Tools Menu of your MS Office application, and then choose Visual Basic Editor from the Macros submenu. When the Visual Basic editor appears, choose Microsoft Visual Basic Help from the Help menu. The help is contextual in the sense that it provides information on automating the Office application from which you launched the Visual Basic editor.

If VBA Help does not appear, you will need to install the help files. Windows Office 2003 prompts you to install the VBA help files when you first request VBA help. You don't need the master CD.

Microsoft has additional information on VBA at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/ and have published their own language references on VBA. One of several third-party books on VBA is "VB & VBA in a Nutshell: The Language" by Paul Lomax (ISBN: 1-56592-358-8).

Office Automation in Xojo vs. VB

There is an implied Application instance when you write VBA code from within Excel, PowerPoint, or Word. For example this is VBA code running in PowerPoint:

Dim pres As Presentation
Dim slide1 As Slide

Set pres = Presentations.Add
' The above is the same as saying:
' Set pres = Application.Presentations.Add

Set slide1 = pres.Slides.Add(1, ppLayoutText)

In PowerPoint, the above code would run just fine since it knows what a Presentation object is. Obviously if you typed this code in either Word or Excel, it would generate errors. Here's the Xojo code:

Var PowerPoint As New PowerPointApplication
Var pres As OLEObject
Var slide1 As OLEObject
pres = PowerPoint.Presentations.Add
slide1 = pres.Slides.Add(1, Office.ppLayoutText)

There's really only two differences here. First, all objects are now OLEObjects, so whether it's a Presentation or Slide, you can create them all as of type OLEObject. All constant values are in the Office module.

Passing parameters by Name

Xojo doesn't support passing parameters by name; however you can still achieve this with a bit of work. First of all, you have to understand how to use the OLEObject. Here's an example that you can model after. Let's record a find and replace macro in Word and translate it to Xojo. This is the VB code:

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "find this"
.Replacement.Text = "replace with"
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = false
.MatchCase = false
.MatchWholeWord = false
.MatchWildcards = false
.MatchSoundsLike = false
.MatchAllWordForms = false
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Here's what it looks like in Xojo.

Var word As New WordApplication
Var find As OLEObject
find = word.Selection.Find
find.ClearFormatting
find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
find.Text = "find this"
find.Replacement.Text = "replace with"
find.Wrap = Office.wdFindContinue
find.Format = False
find.MatchCase = False
find.MatchWholeWord = False
find.MatchWildcards = False
find.MatchSoundsLike = False
find.MatchAllWordForms = False
// Now the fun stuff
Var replaceParam As New OLEParameter
replaceParam.Value = Office.wdReplaceAll
// according to the docs on Find.Execute the Replace parameter is the 11th
replaceParam.Position = 11
find.Execute replaceParam

That's all there is too it. Obviously the most painful bit is finding the correct position of that named parameter. That's about the only time when you really need to launch VBA and look it up in their Object Browser.

Troubleshooting

Here is a procedure to verify that the OLE libraries are installed.

One easy way is to launch Visual Basic Editor (under the Tools and Macros menu), and do some automation with VBA.

Here are the steps you can use to automate PowerPoint from Word:

Launch Word.
Launch Visual Basic Editor in Word.
Insert a UserForm.
Add a CommandButton to the form.
In the click event of the button, put in this code:

Var obj As Object
Set obj = CreateObject("PowerPoint.Application")
obj.Activate

Run the program and click on the button.

If PowerPoint starts and you don't get any errors, then the OLE libraries are installed.

Error Handling

Errors come through OLE, so you need to handle OLEExceptions. This will report the last command that failed along with any additional information about the exception.

Var word As New WordApplication
word.ShowClipboard
Exception err As OLEException
MessageBox(err.Message)