Interaction between Mac Office (e.g., Excel) and other application?

[Luther Miller]

I'm research ways that a proposed application might be developed, and
Excel on the Mac will play a role. I am experienced with Office on
Windows, but I am not very familiar with Office on the Mac.

1. I believe that the current version of Office on the Mac is more or
less equivalent to Office XP / 2002 - is this correct?
2. Is there a way to programmatically commnicate with another Mac
application from an Office application (using VBA I would assume)?
E.g., transfer data back and forth between either a Java desktop app
or a browser (Intranet) app? The only analagy that comes to mind is
DDE...
3. I understand from my posting in the mac Excel usenet group that
Office on the Mac does NOT include any ways to call Web Services. Is
this true?
4. Sounds like the best, er, only option for connectivity for Mac
Excel is to use web queries for retrieving data. Uploading data may
require more manual work (formatting/parsing) but could be done on the
POST side of things... Correct assumption?

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Luther,

I'll intersperse my thoughts into your questions below.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
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I'm research ways that a proposed application might be developed, and
Excel on the Mac will play a role. I am experienced with Office on
Windows, but I am not very familiar with Office on the Mac.

1. I believe that the current version of Office on the Mac is more or
less equivalent to Office XP / 2002 - is this correct?

For cross-platform development purposes I'd consider Mac Excel closer to
Office 97. The version of Visual Basic for Applications is 5. If you stick
with the Office 97 stuff you should be fine. Avoid anything to do with
Active-X. Although Active-X is open source, there is no Mac version at this
time.

If you feel really ambitious you could make a port of Active-X. Visit It
<http://www.opengroup.org/> where you can you can read Active-X

2. Is there a way to programmatically commnicate with another Mac
application from an Office application (using VBA I would assume)?
E.g., transfer data back and forth between either a Java desktop app
or a browser (Intranet) app? The only analagy that comes to mind is
DDE...

Mac office offers some DDE support. However the only Mac apps that I know of
that support DDE are Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

If you can set up a folder that is shared on a network then Macs and Windows
can both share the same Excel workbook at the same time using Tools > Share
Workbook in Excel. Excel is the only application that I know of that lets
both Mac and Windows users share a file at the same time.

3. I understand from my posting in the mac Excel usenet group that
Office on the Mac does NOT include any ways to call Web Services. Is
this true?

AFAIK that is true. Web services require Active-X.

4. Sounds like the best, er, only option for connectivity for Mac
Excel is to use web queries for retrieving data. Uploading data may
require more manual work (formatting/parsing) but could be done on the
POST side of things... Correct assumption?

No. File sharing is one way. You can also use ODBC. ODBC allows you full
relational database control using SQL. It does require a connection between
the server and the client, though.