Chapter 9. Understanding and Using Windows API Calls
In the Programming with the Windows API chapter of ofr Excel 20 2 VBA Programmers Refermnce, we approached the subject of using Windows API calls by explaining how to locate the definitions for various functions on the MSDN Web site and translate those functions for use in VBA. The idea was to enable readers to browse through the API documentation and use anything of interest they found.
In reality, extremely few people use Windows API calls in that manner; indeed, trying to include previously unexplored API calls in our Excel applications is very likely to result in a maintenance problem, because it's doubtful that another developer will understand what we were trying to do. Instead, most of us go to Google and search the Web or the newsgroups for the answer to a problem and find that the solution requires the use of API calls. (Searching Google for "Excel Windows API" results in more than 200,000 Web pages and 19,000 newsgroup posts.) We copy the solution into our application and hope it works, usually without really understanding what it does. This chapter shines a light on many of those solutions, explaining how they work, what they use the API calls for, and how they can be modified to better fit our applications. Along the way, we fill in some of the conceptual framework of common Windows API techniques and terminology.
By the end of the chapter, you will be comfortable about including API calls in your applications, understand how they work, accept their use in the example applications we develop in this book and be able to modify them to suit your needs.
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