Productivity is the biggest challenge for any company or small business. Increasing productivity is Microsoft Office’s goal. In that spirit, Microsoft has sought to include features that allow corporate and small business developers to produce quality in-house applications that harness the power and versatility of Office in order to quickly build customized solutions. Automation is the key to this strategy.

Automation (formerly known as OLE Automation) is the programmatic manipulation of any program or component based on certain rules following the Component Object Model (COM). Automation was first pioneered and developed by Visual Basic and Office as a way to allow developers to extend and control the Office environment both internally and externally.

While it is not necessary to know all the details about how Automation works, you should familiarize yourself with some of the key terms and concepts. Namely, an Automation client is any piece of code that creates and calls an instance of a COM server that exposes an “object model.” Object models are an arrangement of classes that expose functionality through various properties and methods and enable programmers to control a product. A particular instance of one of these classes is an object and the properties and methods comprise its interface. The object model for each Office application is different, and must be learned before Automation code can be written.

The Edraw Office Viewer Component provides some simple automation functions. You can call them directly. Or you can get the dispatch interface then do the automation by yourself. The component exposes the Application and ActiveDocument interfaces.