When you develop Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications programs for Office, you often apply functionality and tools across the Office suite. Building integrated solutions helps you keep the core of your information centralized and easy to manage, while allowing you to communicate that information in ways that best suit your users' needs.
In this chapter you'll create an integrated Office solution. You'll begin with an Access database containing a form that lets users interact with your program. The custom form provides options for creating a Word report for management and customers, an Excel worksheet for data analysis, and a PowerPoint presentation for meetings and sales demonstrations. It also has the ability to use Outlook to automatically send the documents your program generates through e-mail. The code you'll add in the Access database file drives the automatic generation of all these documents.
TIP
The full solution for this chapter is provided in the Chapter 8 practice folder in the file Energy.mdb. Open the Energy.mdb file and press ALT+F11 to display the Visual Basic Editor and the code in the database. You can then use this chapter as a step-by-step guide for each line of code in the project.