Late binding to Outlook

[Seth Schrock]

I just want to make sure that I'm understanding everything correctly. Late binding doesn't require a reference to the Outlook library as it will create it at run time. Does this mean that it will work for different versions of Outlook? I create my databases in Access 2010, but my users run mostly Office 2007 or 2010. I think that we even have some still on 2003 and we just got our first PC that will be running 2013. From what I have read in books and online, I believe that late binding will solve my problem, but unfortunately my test system doesn't have Outlook at all so I can't test my theory.

[Stewart Ross]

Late binding will work OK with different versions of Outlook as long as you are using properties and methods common to all versions, and (of course) that you are not programming features of Outlook that were only introduced in later versions.

One of the downsides of late binding is that you lose all Intellisense features and compiler error checking related to the use of the Outlook methods and properties.

In light of this, be aware that you will need to define any symbolic constants you want to use in your code before referring to them, as without a reference to the relevant code library the symbolic value cannot be looked up at run-time.

-Stewart

[Seth Schrock]

My code will add a task to Outlook 2010, so I think I'm fine with the symbolic constants (not sure what those are to be honest). Is there a website that lists what features are available for each version so that I can know that I'm using features that are available?

[zmbd]

Borrowed this from automation as the values are quite difficult to locate - I've also used the same names that intellisense does so I wouldn't have to recode :).

How I developed this was to use the library referenece while building my code so that the intellisense was avaiable... and so that I could find the Constant values to use.

Then as Stewart mentioned, I used only the most basic options as I use this mainly to send code error messages to myself and another in the lab.

Const olMailItem As Long = 0    'For Late Binding
    Const olFolderInbox As Long = 6 'For Late Binding
    Const olFormatHTML As Long = 2  'For Late Binding