Office Integration -HOW?

[Andrew Budds]

I'm planning to link together MS Office apps to form a tailored workflow system
for various business oriented tasks, with a GUI front end. The problem is
that I
want to do this in some flavour of Java, with as little VB as possible.

The question I can find very few answers to is HOW !
For example how to get, say J++, to get data from, say, MS Access, and
pump it into a Word document (using mail-merge into a GIVEN template). Then
send the result by E-mail, by using Office apps merely as tools,
i.e. without the user having to see/use any of the Office tools on screen.

I'd be very grateful for help, pointers to sources of information, ANYTHING
really, on how to go about this.

Andrew Budds.

[VBSUPPORTER]

VBSUPPORTER WROTE:
To do that without cracking your head, use VB to call MIcrosoft office by
declaring as an object. This will save lot of your sweet time and make things
done easily.




"Andrew Budds" <abud@informate.be> wrote:
>
>I'm planning to link together MS Office apps to form a tailored workflow
system
>for various business oriented tasks, with a GUI front end. The problem is
>that I
>want to do this in some flavour of Java, with as little VB as possible.
>
>The question I can find very few answers to is HOW !
>For example how to get, say J++, to get data from, say, MS Access, and
>pump it into a Word document (using mail-merge into a GIVEN template). Then
>send the result by E-mail, by using Office apps merely as tools,
>i.e. without the user having to see/use any of the Office tools on screen.
>
>I'd be very grateful for help, pointers to sources of information, ANYTHING
>really, on how to go about this.
>
> Andrew Budds.

[John Timney (MVP)]

Have you thought about looking at StarOffice from Sun,. it has a VBA
syntactical language as well as java and can produce MS Office compatable
doc files, excel etc. I dont think its anywhere near as advanced as office
(it has a ten year start after all) but it may give you what you need.

Alternatively, look at using a com bridge to automate office, you can talk
to any com utility through them.

--
Regards

John Timney
Microsoft MVP
(http://support.microsoft.com/support/mvp/program.asp)
Co-Author Professional JSP
ISBN: 1-861003-62-5



Andrew Budds <abud@informate.be> wrote in message
news:39afb892$1@news.devx.com...
>
> I'm planning to link together MS Office apps to form a tailored workflow
system
> for various business oriented tasks, with a GUI front end. The problem is
> that I
> want to do this in some flavour of Java, with as little VB as possible.
>
> The question I can find very few answers to is HOW !
> For example how to get, say J++, to get data from, say, MS Access, and
> pump it into a Word document (using mail-merge into a GIVEN template).
Then
> send the result by E-mail, by using Office apps merely as tools,
> i.e. without the user having to see/use any of the Office tools on screen.
>
> I'd be very grateful for help, pointers to sources of information,
ANYTHING
> really, on how to go about this.
>
> Andrew Budds.

[Been there done that]

Why are you writting this in Java? Java is portable and MS Office is not?
If you want to control MS Office you need to use ActiveX which is only available
on Microsoft's own JVM. If you must integrate with Office use VB/VC++.