Cross-application coding and other questions

  • Article

Here's some questions for any of you that do (or perhaps would like to do) Office development. They are more targeted at non-professional developers using VBA (how many of them read my blog?) but even if you're a seasoned pro and you feel like answering, more power to you (and me! Ha!).

Your answers (and other comments) are much appreciated :-) and can be used by Microsoft in future products etc. etc. etc. Obviously this will be a very un-scientific poll (assuming there are any replies ;-) ) but it should still be interesting.

Anyway, here goes:

1. Do you have a need for building solutions that span multiple documents? For example, moving data between a weekly report and a monthly rollup report in Excel

2. Do you have a need for building solutions that span multiple applications? For example, integrating data from Excel into a PowerPoint presentation

3. If you are doing either of these things already, do you have the code in multiple places and rely on events or cross-customisation calls to do the integration, or is all the code in one place and it "drives" the other document / application externally? For example, if you had a solution with two Word documents, the code could be split between both documents and you relied on the Open event or explicit cross-document macro calls, or it could all be inside the main document

4. If you answered "Yes" to either question 1 or 2, but you're not doing this today, is it because you don't know how? Or you know how, but it's too hard? (What makes it hard?). Or for some other reason?

5. And finally, do you (or your users) call macros from one document in the context of another document? For example, in Excel you might have a UDF (User Defined Function) defined inside one workbook, but the user calls that function from another workbook

If you do answer, it would be really cool if you could also say whether you're a full-time coder or not, what tools you use today (VBA, VB6, VSTO, JScript <g>, etc) and how many people tend to use your solutions.

Thanks!