confused using oleview.exe to find methods of interest

[mastermagrath]

Hi all,

Wonder if someone could throw some light on automation in windows in
general.
I was reading a small perl related article in which a programmer
automated internet explorer by creating an explorer object and then
running various methods on this e.g. navigate, goback etc.
My question is that for that programmer he new in advance what he
wanted to do i.e. automate explorer, so he employed oleviewer, looked
under automation objects, found a fairly obvious item there called
"internet exlorer (v6)" and from there went on to view the methods, try
some of them out and hey presto he got what he wanted.

I tried to follow his logic for automating other MS applications but
found it next to impossible to find anything obvious e.g. for MS word,
outlook, powerpoint etc. I was expecting to find a similar entry like
"microsoft outlook" under which i could view all the available methods,
then just go into perl, create an outlook object and start playing
around.

Can someone give me some advice as to how i would go about finding the
information i need should i someday decide i wanted to e.g. automate
outlook.

Are there any good web tutorials or such?

Thanks so much for any help.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Can someone give me some advice as to how i would go about finding the
information i need should i someday decide i wanted to e.g. automate
outlook.

Google on e.g. "automate XXX" where XXX is the name of the app you want to
automate.

Also, start PPT, Word or Excel, go into the VBA IDE (ALT+F11) and use Tools,
References to add a reference to the application you want to automate. Then
press F2 to open the Object Browser; you can limit its view to just objects
from a particular app.