7.1. Hacks 5971

Access isn't an island of an application, not by a long shot. It integrates easily with many programs. Obviously, it shares characteristics with the other Office products, and it is relatively easy to include Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint files in your Access solutions. Several hacks in this chapter do just that. For example, "Import Noncontiguous Ranges of Data from Excel" [Hack #59] and "Use Excel Functions Inside Access" [Hack #61] involve integration with Excel. "Manage Word Documents from Access" [Hack #67] shows you how to use Word's object model to create a programmatic solution, and "Use Word to Compare Data in Two Access Tables" [Hack #62] shows you a neat way to use Word independently to test your data.

This chapter also includes hacks on using XML data, integrating with MySQL, and using SQL Server stored procedures. All in all, the chapter offers quite a bit, and using the techniques presented here will certainly gain you an edge in your development efforts.