Hands on with Office v. X: The Extras

"REALbasic 3.5 is tightly integrated into Office X."

"Also included on the Install CD are extra templates, fonts, clipart, REALBasic, several converters and much more."

Seriously? REALbasic is included? I'm going to call the REALbasic guys to sort this out.

Update: I talked to Lorin in marketing at REALsoftware. Lorin found my site the day after I posted this, to let me know his name isn't spelled Loren as I had assumed, sorry about that. :-)

The REALbasic included is a 30 day demo app that builds apps that run for 5 minutes max. That's a shame, but I understand the reason why. Office v. X has VBA as well but apparently MS isn't too interested in working on it, they'd like nothing more than for REAL to take care of the whole automation thing for them.

Apparently there are REALbasic libraries for automating Office, and they're huge, larger than REALbasic itself, because they implement the whole of VBA (ie: the whole Office object model) exposed to REALbasic. And Lorin says they're cross platform. So you build a REALbasic app with these Office libs and they work with Classic, OSX, Windows, with Office 97, 98, 2000, 2001, XP and v.X.

That is truly impressive.

Written on November 12, 2001