The QAxWidget class is a QWidget that wraps an ActiveX control.
A QAxWidget can be instantiated as an empty object, with the name of the ActiveX control it should wrap, or with an existing interface pointer to the ActiveX control. The ActiveX control's properties, methods and events which only use QAxBase supported data types, become available as Qt properties, slots and signals. The base class QAxBase provides an API to access the ActiveX directly through the IUnknown pointer.
QAxWidget is a QWidget and can mostly be used as such, e.g. it can be organized in a widget hierarchy and layouts or act as an event filter. Standard widget properties, e.g. enabled are supported, but it depends on the ActiveX control to implement support for ambient properties like e.g. palette or font. QAxWidget tries to provide the necessary hints.
However, you cannot reimplement Qt-specific event handlers like mousePressEvent or keyPressEvent and expect them to be called reliably. The embedded control covers the QAxWidget completely, and usually handles the user interface itself. Use control-specific APIs (i.e. listen to the signals of the control), or use standard COM techniques like window procedure subclassing.
QAxWidget also inherits most of its ActiveX-related functionality from QAxBase, notably dynamicCall() and querySubObject().
Warning: You can subclass QAxWidget, but you cannot use the Q_OBJECT macro in the subclass (the generated moc-file will not compile), so you cannot add further signals, slots or properties. This limitation is due to the metaobject information generated in runtime. To work around this problem, aggregate the QAxWidget as a member of the QObject subclass.