Conclusion

Conclusion

Dictator applications enable us to leverage Excel's rich user interface, calculation engine, analysis and/or presentation features, while simulating the look and behavior of a normal Windows program.

The Excel workspace will usually require a significant amount of configuration and customization for the dictator application. Unfortunately, Excel will remember most of these configurations and try to reuse them for the next (user) session. To work around Excel's behavior, we must store the initial state of the user's settings when our application starts and restore them when we close down.

When using a worksheet-based user interface, extreme care must be taken to prevent accidental corruption of the sheet, often as a result of a cut, copy or paste operation.

The practical example for this chapter is a complete, but simple, dictator application template for you to use as a starting point for your own applications. Later chapters in this book add many more features to the application.