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Delphi - Microsoft Excel COM (1)
We have previously touched upon the importance of cross application support between your business application and Microsoft's office products. In this article we will concentrate on using Excel in our Delphi applications.
As most people know Excel is the worlds best loved spreadsheet software, included in every installation of Microsoft Office it is a monster! At Accelerated Ideas we understand that this monster is a serious ally to any business software product and you should too!
Excel is used day in, day out, for a variety of task some of which are very important any business user. It has also become a popular choice for data storage. Rather than spend the time to understand Access and become entangled in the database architecture users prefer to store their data in a simple list form. These lists can be filtered, sorted and edited within seconds so who can blame them?
In this article we are going to answer the following questions from the Delphi developers point of view:
1.How can I start Excel from Delphi?
2.How can I open a file in Excel?
3.How can I read and write data to an Excel sheet?
4.How can I modify the columns in a spreadsheet?
5.How can I save the Excel file?
First lets look at how we can start Excel using Delphi.
Using office products with Delphi (5) is achieved through the COM interface. Component Object Model provides a class interface that we can use in much the same way that we use our Delphi.pas classes. By using COM class objects and ActiveX we can work with these office applications at will.
In order to use the COM classes and create an Excel reference we must include the following classes in our units uses clause:
uses
ComObj, ActiveX, Excel2000, OleServer
These classes are all included with the installation of Delphi (5). However if you wish to use a later version of Excel such as Excel2003.pas you will need to obtain this file before developing your application. All Office applications pas files are located under the Borland installation folder.
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