Data Binding Data binding introduces a whole new capability into Microsoft Office solutions. Excel and Word have no built-in concept of data, which is always embedded in the view, so Office solutions have not generally been designed using a multi-tier architecture. With Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools, you are now able to separate the view from the data, and are able to update the data directly without writing code that touches the view. This means your code does not rely as much on referring to specific cells, ranges and tables, which can be moved around by users. Rather, your code directly accesses XML data islands through data binding. Data binding works the same way in projects in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office as it does in Windows Forms projects. Just drag a data source onto your document from the Data Sources window, then specify the properties. Host controls enable either simple or complex data binding. Data objects created by Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office