On Excel Development (1) Overview of Excel Development

Do Office-related development work for more than a year, in this more than a year, in the development of Plug-ins encountered a variety of problems and difficulties, fortunately, colleagues are very powerful, in and their exchanges and discussions have learned a lot of knowledge. Office-related development information is relatively small, at the very beginning, I read an English material, and then the MSDN above to ask questions. So I want to write something, so that everyone also less take some detours.

This article will briefly introduce some of the relevant knowledge of office development, so that you have a general understanding of this.

First look at how office is developed.

One Office development approach

1 VBA (Visual Basic application)

VBA is a Visual Basic macro language that should be one of the earliest customized solutions for Office, with the macro functionality of VBA in the version of Excel 5.0 released in 1994. The name seems to show that he is a subset of VB, unlike Visual Basic, VBA is a host language. Because of the fire of Visual Basic at that time, VBA has been a great success, with both professional developers and novice developers using VBA to accomplish simple or complex requirements. Now in some office environment, VBA used a lot, such as the domestic more famous Excelhome forum, there are many discussions on Excel VBA, and VBA can also investigate some of the methods in the COM components, in other Office open way, As in VSTO or Sharedaddin, VBA can sometimes assist with some functions, such as the RTD function, the invocation of UDF functions, the development of specialized templates, the demonstration of animation effects, and so on. Not only office, there are many other software industries such as the more famous Arcgis,coreldraw software, all provide a custom solution VBA.

But he also has many shortcomings. VBA itself has a lot of limitations, such as the lack of some commonly used types, debugging is not convenient, VB language, although simple, but now many developers are using. NET,VB some of the syntax may not be adapted to many people. Then again, VBA is a scripting type of interpreted language, where security such as source code is easy to crack, like JavaScript confidentiality, there are no compile-oriented solutions for execution efficiency. For example, we can use VBA to write our custom functions and then store them as. xla files so that we can call these functions in Excel. But because VBA is an interpreted language, like JavaScript, each run is run on the side of an explanation, rather than some other language, which can be loaded directly after it has been translated into binary mode. So you can write our custom functions to the class library and register them, or use C + + to write the functions in XLL, which is better than VBA in terms of efficiency and security, just a little bit, and the following articles will be detailed.