What is the best programming language to use for working with Excel, Office, and Word?

Question

I'm basically looking to replace a lot of my mundane tasks with an automatic process. The tasks include:
- Importing data into Excel, reformatting it, simple stuff, then emailing to some people.
- Taking data out of Excel and putting into a formatted Word document and printing it out.

Simple tasks like that. I would also like to be able to interact with Microsoft Great Plains, but I imagine that's more complicated. So, what's a good language for this kind of stuff? Is there a good general language out there that will let me do this kind of stuff with other programms? If i'm going to learn how to do it, I'd like to learn how to do it with everything, not just microsoft

Answer 1

It is VBA

It is a special version of Visual Basic called (Visual Basic for Application)

That comes inbed with all Office applications (And even AutoCAD and Corel Draw)



I consider my self as the VBAXLMan here if you need any questions



Enjoy my profile, And my site http://www.file1.net

Answer 2

Excel Programming Language

Answer 3

Well, the answers above that mentioned VBA and VB are both right in their ways (the macro recorder one not so much). Since both Excel and Word (all the MS Office programs), and many othes are "automation servers" or com serves (or even an OLE servers) -- you'll see these terms, you want a language that will let you program automation easily. But for ease of use, choose, say VB. BTW, when an app advertises itself as an automation server, you can program it with any language that works with OLE easily.



VB is one of those and has the benefit of being the language that you can program the Office apps internally, that is build complex actions within Excel, for example. Oh: that language really is VBA. VBS (VB script) will let you work with automation servers directly as well.



If you're a perl guru, you'll find that perl can do the same thing. So can c#. c++ too, although that's a hard hard road.



So start with VB (VB6 is/was really easy to do this in) and you'll find lots of tutorials on the web, especially ones dealing with Excel.

Answer 4

I have used OpenOffice in the past. The only problem I ran into is that I had problems with the formatting of a resume that I had done in MS Word. It was a pain because I had put so much into the resume and it just would not display just right. Apparently there are some formatting options that are different between the two, and since most businesses use Word you may not see what they see. Having said that, I heartily endorse a product that is comprehensive, free and provides some good healthy competition for Microsoft products.

Answer 5

Visual Basic

Answer 6

Use the Macro Recorders in each of the programs, and you can convert them to Visual BASIC for Applications (VBA) codes.

Answer 7

VBA