Visual Basic Concepts

Browsing Objects from Other Applications

From within Visual Basic, you can access and control objects supplied by other applications. For example, if you have Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel on your system, you could use a Graph object from Microsoft Excel and a Calendar object from Microsoft Project as part of your application.

You can use the Object Browser to explore the type libraries of other applications. An type library provides information about the objects provided by other applications.

Note   In the Project/Library list, there are separate entries for Visual Basic (VB) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Although we speak of "objects provided by Visual Basic," you'll notice that the Collection object is provided by VBA.

You can add libraries to your project by selecting References from the Object Browser's context menu, to open the References dialog box.

For More Information   For more details on using Automation to combine and manipulate objects from other applications, see "Programming with Components."