As you know, each of the MS Office applications is a very flexible product, providing the user with extensive capabilities. By using these capabilities, it is possible to create more efficient and technologically advanced applications. ActiveX technology enables interaction between different MS Office applications, as well as with any programs that support this technology, for example, Visual Basic, through the Component Object Model (COM). This technology was previously called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). Currently, OLE is part of ActiveX technology.
ActiveX technology is designed for simple and efficient interaction between different products. For example, MS Word or MS Excel can provide their objects to each other. This makes it possible to create documents consisting of elements developed in different applications. ActiveX provides the developer with two powerful tools for building applications:
- OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) — linking and embedding objects from different applications, which allows editing objects created by other applications directly within a document.
- Automation — a technology that enables programmatic control of both embedded objects and the objects of other applications. This significantly reduces development time, since there is no need to reimplement features that are not built-in but are available in other specialized applications.
NOTE
ActiveX technology assumes that the integrated applications, whose objects are used in a document, are installed and registered in the system registry. As a rule, application registration takes place automatically during installation.