Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO) supports Word, Excel and Outlook and allows developers to build robust Office applications in both the C# and VB languages. This practical guide shows you how to leverage the power of VSTO to write enterprise software targeting Office 2003. Even if you're not entirely familiar with VSTO, you'll find this book to be an indispensable resource to building your knowledge of this new technology.

Beginning chapters review basic concepts and serve as building blocks upon which the remaining chapters are built. Working examples provide solutions to common programming requirement issues so that even if you are a seasoned developer, you'll still find many useful techniques and strategies to solving enterprise-level software problems from an Office perspective using VSTO.

What you will learn from this book

• Maximizing Office 2003's power and flexibility in enterprise software
• Automating Office objects from Visual Studio and Windows Console applications
• Extracting functionality and performance from Word and Excel
• Creating exciting Excel charts and powerful PivotTable® reports
• Avoiding common pitfalls while porting VBA code to VSTO as well as workarounds to technical limitations in the Office API

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who are planning to adopt VSTO as an enterprise solution. A familiarity with Object Oriented concepts is required. An understanding of Visual Studio .NET is recommended, but not required. Recent .NET adopters with a VBA background will find this book especially useful.

• Visual Studio Tools for Office
• Excel Automation
• Advanced Excel Automation
• Word Automation
• Outlook Automation
• The Charting Tool
• Pivot Table Automation
• Index