The book does a great job of explaining how VB.NET can "wrapper" the Office COM objects so they are compatible with .NET and how to include them into a VB.NET program. But the book doesn't actually mention the real future of Office ... which is to gradually integrate .NET into Office while maintaining some backward compatibility with COM (both for Office and for the other COM objects created by other software vendors). So we'll give you an introduction to the REAL future of programming with .NET and Office here.
That future has already started with an add-on Office developer tool with the excessively long name, Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. Developers refer to it as VSTO (pronounced "Visto").
One negative about learning this new technology is that it's a moving target right now. Anything you learn now is sure to change in just a little while. In 2003, Microsoft released VSTO. And in July 0f 2004, they released a beta of the next versionwhich you can try out with Office 2003 now, but which is really targeted for Office 2005.
VSTO works with Visual Studio to let you create an Assembly that is linked to Word or Excel documents. (Sorry ... other Office applications don't work with it yet.)
