Office Object Model Thoughts

re: Office Object Model Thoughts

Thomas Williams — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 04:59:00 GMT

Wow Eric, what you are suggesting (your "attractive characteristics") sounds great! When is .Net for Office...I'm sick of using VBA!

Cheers, Thomas

re: Office Object Model Thoughts

Jason Dossett — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 13:30:00 GMT

Great idea, this is very much needed. And if Microsoft were to undertake adding this kind of interface, one of the major requirements should be that it can be automated safely from outside the application to allow the server-side automation that Microsoft currently recommends against and doesn't support.

re: Office Object Model Thoughts

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 14:29:00 GMT

The problem with developing for MS office is that Microsoft doesn't provide a "server" version. For example, if your website needed to create PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets dynamically, it is just not a good idea to be launching the applications on your server. So to do this, people end up having to purchase some 3rd party component that does it... and the 3rd party company had to "figure out" the file format, so there's no telling how reliable that would be. Microsoft is losing out on some big money for not having this.

re: Office Object Model Thoughts

Eric Carter — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 18:56:00 GMT

I definitely agree that we need to have object models for Office that can be used to create documents on the server. Turns out that VSTO 2.0 has some features in that area that I will blog about later that let you do some server side programming against Office documents.

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