Which tools are needed to do Office automation

[Andre]

Greetings,
freshly coming over to Visual Studio from other IDEs (bad words starting
with 'd') I am still uncertain about some things.

I used to do some MS office automation from my applications. Mainly
mail-merges and small Excel tables.

Can I still automate Office2000 docs or will I need 2003/2007?
How to do that with VS pro? Which tools do I probably need in addition to VS
pro?
I tried to find a trial or a demo for the "VSTools for Office (VSTO)", but
there is none.
Is that what I need to do a comfortable automation?

Thanks,
André

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Andre,

I used to do some MS office automation from my applications. Mainly
mail-merges and small Excel tables.

Can I still automate Office2000 docs or will I need 2003/2007?
How to do that with VS pro? Which tools do I probably need in addition to VS
pro?
I tried to find a trial or a demo for the "VSTools for Office (VSTO)", but
there is none.
Is that what I need to do a comfortable automation?

You can automate Office 2000 using Visual Studio, but there won't be a
pre-installed set of PIAs available. When you set a reference to an Office 2000
app's type library (in the COM, not the .NET tab!) Visual Studio will run
TlbImp.exe and generate a set of IAs in your project's folder. You then need to
distribute these with your project.

(Office 2002 and 2003 have PIAs, provided by Microsoft, that are installed in
the GAC, making them available to all. Yours will be specific to your project.)

If you're automating Office, you don't want to use VSTO, just Visual Studio.
And anyway, VSTO only works with version 2003 and above.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail