Controlling One Microsoft Office Application from Another

If you want to run code in one Microsoft Office application that works with the objects in another application, follow these steps.

1. Set a reference to the other application's type library in the References dialog box (Tools menu). After you have done this, the objects, properties, and methods will show up in the Object Browser and the syntax will be checked at compile time. You can also get context-sensitive Help on them.
2. Declare object variables that will refer to the objects in the other application as specific types. Make sure you qualify each type with the name of the application that is supplying the object. For example, the following statement declares a variable that points to a Microsoft Word document and another that refers to a Microsoft Excel workbook:

   Dim appWD As Word.Application, wbXL As Excel.Workbook

   Note
   You must follow the preceding steps if you want your code to be early bound.

3. Use the CreateObject function with the OLE Programmatic Identifiers of the object you want to work with in the other application, as shown in the following example. If you want to see the session of the other application, set the Visible property to True.

   Dim appWD As Word.Application Set appWD = CreateObject("Word.Application") appWd.Visible = True

4. Apply properties and methods to the object contained in the variable. For example, the following instruction creates a new Word document.

   Dim appWD As Word.Application Set appWD = CreateObject("Word.Application") appWD.Documents.Add

5. When you are done working with the other application, use the Quit method to close it, as shown in the following example.

   appWd.Quit