open MS Word files

Alex Rice alrice at ARCplanning.com
Mon Jun 9 00:56:01 EDT 2003


On Sunday, June 8, 2003, at 12:21  PM, Jan Schenkel wrote:

>
> Hi Sims,
>
> Too bad you're on a PC, or this wouldn't have been too
> hard to implement using AppleScript. On Windows, you
> may have a shot at it using Dynamic Data Exchange
> (DDE) calls.
> Even though DDE isn't supported directly in RunRev,
> there's the Externals Collection :
> http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/external.htm
> You can use Google to find a group where you can ask
> for more info on MS Word DDE calls.

I have googled around a fair amount on this topic in the past, and got 
nowhere. I have absolutely no idea what one can or cannot do with DDE 
and how to get started with it. If anyone has that golden URL or book 
reference I would be happy to hear it.

I have used the MS Office Automation APIs from VBA (in MS Excel) and 
from Realbasic. It's pretty easy to learn since the API is documented 
in the MS Office Help on Windows. The Realbasic implementation was 
pretty slow and buggy. I'm guessing it's not an easy programming 
problem.

Also isn't DDE double-deprecated now? Someone told me it was the 
predecessor of COM which is out of favor, now with .NET? Sheesh. 
Richmond.

On Windows isn't there some kind of Scripting Engine Architecture? Now 
Perl and Python on Win32 are (relatively more) first class citizens 
than they used to be. They have nice distributions that hook into Win32 
and COM APIs pretty extensively. The PythonWin distribution is very 
cool. You can write Python scripts with native Win32 API GUI and call 
any old DLL. It's a cool trick. Runrev needs to hook into that stuff 
too.

There has got to be some way for Runrev to communicate with other apps 
on Windows. Especially MS Office.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com






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