Programming Technologies

Office 2000 and Microsoft Script Editor

Microsoft Office developers are accustomed to using the Visual Basic Editor to add Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code to Office documents. However, now that Office 2000 documents support HTML as a native document format, developers need to work with objects and scripts in an Office 2000 document that can be displayed on the Web.

To help developers work with HTML documents, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft Access 2000, and Microsoft FrontPage 2000 provide the Microsoft Script Editor. The Script Editor is a new and powerful integrated development tool that allows developers to work with Office 2000 documents as Web pages.

The Script Editor allows you to do the following:

• Edit HTML in a document.
• Add script, ActiveX, and HTML intrinsic controls.
• View a document as a Web page.

To open the Microsoft Script Editor in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or FrontPage

1. On the Tools menu, point to Macro.
2. Click Microsoft Script Editor.

In Access, the Microsoft Script Editor is available from the Tools menu only when you are working with data access pages.

Note   FrontPage supports entering script from the HTML tab in Page view, and automatically generates HTML when using other tools such as the DHTML Effects tool. Microsoft Outlook 2000 does not support the Microsoft Script Editor. However, you can write Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) to customize Outlook by using the scripting environment available within the Outlook forms, which are used to display items such as messages and appointments.

The Microsoft Script Editor supports working with the scripting languages provided by the scripting engines that are installed on a user’s computer. Office 2000 installs Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, which installs scripting engines for Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition version 5.0, and Microsoft JScript version 5.0 scripting languages.

Top

VBScript

Visual Basic Scripting Edition provides a subset of the Microsoft Visual Basic programming language features, and as a result, VBScript is very easy to use for developers who are familiar with Visual Basic. VBScript can be used with Internet Explorer to work with the following:

• Dynamic HTML
• ActiveX controls
• Automation servers
• Java applets

Visual Basic Scripting Edition can also be used for server-side script that runs on Microsoft Internet Information Server (Windows NT 4.0) or Internet Information Services (Windows 2000), and for working with Windows Scripting Host.

Top

JScript

JScript is the Microsoft implementation of the ECMA 262 language specification. JScript is a full implementation, with some additional enhancements that take advantage of capabilities of Internet Explorer. JScript is a general-purpose scripting language that appeals to the programmers who use C, C++, and Java. JScript can also be used with Internet Explorer to work with the following:

• Dynamic HTML
• ActiveX controls
• Automation servers
• Java applets

JScript can also be used for scripting in Web pages that are viewed in Netscape Navigator.

Top

See also

For more information about using VBScript and JScript, see the Microsoft Scripting Technologies Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/.