It was amazingly easy to interact with other apps via OLE Automation (aka, COM Automation).

About 25 years ago I wrote a program that would look for requests (in the form of XML files) from the custom software on our Solaris system, then based on the contents of the request it would fire up Word, load up the appropriate letterhead and body template, fill in the required information (e.g., client name/address, caseworker name, etc), print two copies (one for the file, one with an envelope to send out), and store the completed document in the client's folder on the fileserver.

This program saved an incredible amount of time and let the office typing pool concentrate on typing dictated letters instead of filling out templates.

Without the magic of OLE Automation letting me use Word programmatically from my application, creating this would have been basically impossible.

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ikidd 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Man, I wrote a lot of things that used OLE. Microsoft was heavy on building things like that. I wrote a program that would load up patient data and build referral letters for physicians and send them via electronic fax. It freed up like three admin staff that were dealing with that before and hating it.

The funny part was some of them must have been so seldom used that I'd run into problems and uncover bugs that were very quickly apparent, and I'd call MS support and they had never had them reported. I sometimes wondered if I was the only person that used them. WebDAV for Exchange was another on of those things.

	▲	Mister_Snuggles 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I remember calling MS support, vaguely related to this project. For example, if the Edmonton office needed to send a welcome letter to a new client, the flow might look like this: 1. Create a new file based on X:\Templates\EdmontonLetterhead.dot 2. Insert the contents of X:\Templates\A01-ClientOnboarding.doc 3. Fill in fields. Usually stuff like client name, caseworker name, etc. 4. Click the links in the file (e.g., there'd be a link to X:\Templates\EdmontonContactNumbers.doc), printing each document and deleting the link from the final document. 5. Save the file to the client's folder (e.g., S:\Clients\000123-Jane Smith). 6. Print a copy for the paper file, a copy to mail out, and an envelope. We called Microsoft Support because when changes were made to the template documents it would update the links to relative paths. These don't work with our flow because the document either isn't saved, or is saved on a different network drive. Microsoft Support wasn't able to help us. They understood exactly what we were doing, exactly what the problem is, but they weren't able to fix it. That's just how Word works, it didn't have a setting to force absolute links. I ended up writing another VB6 program, using OLE Automation to get Word to do the work, which opened each document, saved it to a local drive (which turned the relative links into absolute links), then copied it back to the shared drive.