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December 1996 Reviews This Month
By James E. Powell
More than 1 million users think of Microsoft Office as a development platform as well as an applications suite. The new VBA found in Office 97 will be a pleasant surprise for those development people.
The program's best feature is the time-saving IntelliSense, which adds drop-down lists of methods, properties and controls in a form and offers plenty of typing shortcuts.
All the standard features of a development environment are here. Microsoft redesigned the user interface so that you now have a collapsible project outline and tabbed properties windows that let you group properties alphabetically or by category.
Most aspects of VBA are themselves editable ActiveX controls that you can use in your own applications. It's possible to group controls on a form and copy them back to the toolbox to become new custom controls to be used in other applications.
VBA is now part of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access and will be licensed to other applications in the coming months. It definitely will help make the case for developing with Office 97.
-- INFO FILE --
Price: Included in Office 97
Platforms: 95, NT
Microsoft Corp.
800-426-9400, 206-882-8080
WinMag Box Score: 4.5
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