This sessions shows how automation works by "controlling" Microsoft Word from an application. The demo simply opens up a Word document and saves it under a different name. The code is pretty self-explanatory. I never got the Excel example to run correctly, so there's nothing on that page currently.
To really understand what is going on you need to understand Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), OLE Automation and The Component Object Model (COM). They are very complex technologies with a steep learning curve. Fortunately, Turbo C++ and RAD Studio have created a very nice environment in which to handle all of the tedious complexities. You will never want to program these technologies "by hand" again!
- MainForm.h - The definition of the main form.
- MainForm.cpp - The implementation.
- Project files (Turbo C++ only) (See notes about XE 3 at the bottom of the page) - to build it yourself. The .zip file includes a /docs folder with some Microsoft Word documents to play with.
- Help File This is a Windows help file from Microsoft. It shows several examples. Unfortunately, all of the examples are in Visual Basic, as that was the main reason for automation. This file was originally downloaded from here.
Note: I'm not sure why yet, but this project doesn't work with the latest IDE. I get an Internal Compiler Error. I think it has something to do with the version of the automation objects that I'm using. It does work with Turbo C++ 2006, though, so you can still experiment with it, if you want. I also believe this only works with Microsoft Word 2000, since the API is different between versions. Since it's pretty old, it probably has limited use today, but the code to perform the automation would be similar.
Finally, this project wasn't a theoretical one just for demonstration purposes. In 2006, when I switched over to Linux full-time, I had hundreds of Word documents from previous years. I didn't want to lose them, nor did I want to manually convert each one to a format that I could handle in Linux (with OpenOffice, at the time.) So, I wrote this project to "automate" (hence the term automation) the conversion process. I actually wrote it in Delphi, as it was probably the most powerful native Windows language ever created. I just "ported" it to C++ for this session.
So, just exactly what was I converting? I was converting many older version of Word documents into the Word 2000 version, which could be handled in OpenOffice just fine. The process simply opens a Word document and then saves it as a newer version. I could have done nearly anything with the automation, such as changing fonts, or adding/removing text, styles, tables, etc. I just wanted the version upgraded. OpenOffice wasn't able to handle some of the older Word formats, so this solved that problem nicely!
I was able to compile most of this project with RAD Studio XE 3, but a few lines didn't compile. It's likely due to the old version of Word and/or Windows 7. I don't own any other version of Word (and it's unlikely I ever will) so I won't be able to update this.