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I am curious as to what applications can be manipulated using VBA. I was under the impression that any application can be accessed with VBA by creating an object instance of the application, but I am sure there certain applications that can't.

I have the following questions:

Can any application be instantiated as object?

What would prevent an application from being able to be instantiated as an object?

ElectroMotiveHorse
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  • Being a .NET application that doesn't expose a COM API would be *one* thing that prevents VBA from being able to instantiate it. Bethsheba's answer is the best answer you'll get here; your question is too broad to be a good fit on this site. See [ask] for more info. – Mathieu Guindon Jan 25 '18 at 15:39

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An application is only controllable in VBA (via automation) if it has an appropriate Component Object Model (COM) interface.

All the Microsoft Office programs have COM interfaces, but it's not a necessary requirement for applications that run on Windows.

For further reading, see What is COM?

Bathsheba
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