A guide to finding com component methods and properties

A guide to finding com component methods and properties

We are familiar with using the macro recorder in Word and Excel to help with writing Object Application Automation. There are times that we need more. This is a quick tour of using Object Browser. Object Browser is built in Word, Excel and of course Visual Basic. Open Excel or Word. Choice menu Tools -> Macro -> Visual Basic Editor.
From Visual Basic Editor menu select View -> Object Browser.

You will see a drop down box with æAll LibrariesÆ in it. You can do a search to look for key words. Select known objects to research methods and properties. When needing to know more about an item, press the F1 help key to retrieve additional info.

From the library listing you can select just the library to work with. If the library you need is not there, and it was loaded on your system you can add this to the listing. For example, say you wanted to know more about the treview control object model. From the menu select Tools -> References. The default for the browse is DLL, OLB, TLB, change this to *.OCX, In the listing look for MSCOMCT2.ocx. With this loaded, use the library listing to display only the MSCOMCT2.OCX, you will see all the controls in it with the methods and properties.

I hope this helps with Application Automation development.