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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Using XML to hook to new applications?, January 19, 2004
This review is from: Developing Microsoft Office Solutions: Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97 (Paperback)
Why did Excel outrun its competitors (remember them)? Bluttman suggests that the crucial point came in Excel 5, when you could now use Visual Basic to build quick, simple applications on top of Excel. It is along these lines that he motivates this book. What he attempts to show is how you can easily customise each of the MS Office products, through relatively straightforward programming. He systematically goes through MS Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook. For each, he gives examples of how to extend the functionality. Typically, these are done through Visual Basic. Now, VB does have its limitations. Fundamentally, it is a procedural language in which it is hard to write large programs. But it turns out that when you extend an Office product, the amount of coding is usually not that much. The basic reason is that the bulk of the complexity in what you want to do often already resides in Office. What you need customised is a few simple steps to tie various parts of [eg] your spreadsheet together. The OTHER major point of the book is how to use the new XML capabilities in Office. You can now save data in an XML format, instead of it being buried in a Microsoft proprietary binary format. What is the big deal? Well, this now opens the way to much easier integration with non-Microsoft applications. The Visual Basic customisation discussed above really only can be run on top of Office. It has a strength and a weakness. The strength is that it can let you be a consultant, say, to companies that need these customisations. (Apparently, Bluttman was quite successful at this!) But this very strength can be a weakness. Typically, those customisations are client-specific. There is little code reuse. Sure, you may be able to command a nice hourly rate. But all you can transfer between clients is your expertise. Nice, but labour intensive. By contrast, you now have a way to build a separate, full standalone application that can take advantage of Office. The use of XML for data interchange opens entirely new vistas. Given the worldwide distribution of Office, this enables a potentially enormous third party market for you, if you can implement a novel enough application with broad appeal. Maybe there is a business here for you?
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How to get the most out of Microsoft Office, February 15, 2004
This review is from: Developing Microsoft Office Solutions: Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97 (Paperback)
If anybody had any doubts that Microsoft is moving towards making its Office suite more of a complete corporate business development platform, the contents of Developing Microsoft Office Solutions should convince them of how far the product has come since its days as a pure personal productivity tool. Ken Bluttman's cookbook for Microsoft Office power users and developers contains a treasure of VBA applications to exploit all versions of Microsoft Office, but especially the new or improved features in Office 2003 such as XML, smart tags and InfoPath. Being able to save files in XML format is especially interesting because it makes it easier to create web services. The book contains a good selection of applications for Excel, Word and Access. All of them, fortunately, are on the book's web site, so you can download a sample program and just change it as needed. InfoPath is completely new. It's part of the Professional Enterprise Edition and it's for "creating distributable forms". Bluttman's book contains screen shots of all the dialogs needed to design new forms, which makes it pretty straightforward to follow along. It looks as though this could be really useful in a group environment. There's a lot of information in this book, but all the samples I tried worked fine and were useful applications.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Solution development tools and procedures, March 7, 2004
This review is from: Developing Microsoft Office Solutions: Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97 (Paperback)
Developing Microsoft Office Solutions by computer systems expert and independent consultant Ken Bluttman comprehensively covers Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97 in its specifically designed mission to provide what developers need to know to solve practical business problems with Microsoft Office applications. Solution development tools and procedures for Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, XML, and InfoPath are deftly discussed with illustrative examples, as well as offering more detailed solution construction advice for such tasks as repurposing XML content, situations with dynamic data delivery, smart tags, and more. Case studies and examples round out this exhaustive, 586-page, highly recommended instructional resource.
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