Early vs. Late Binding
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Early vs. Late Binding
Article contributed by Dave Rado
There are two ways to use Automation (or OLE Automation) to
programmatically control another application.
Late binding uses CreateObject to create and instance of the application
object, which you can then control. For example, to create a new instance
of Excel using late binding:
Dim oXL As Object
Set oXL = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
On the other hand, to manipulate an existing instance of Excel (if Excel is
already open) you would use GetObject (regardless whether you're using
early or late binding):
Dim oXL As Object
Set oXL = GetObject(, "Excel.Application")
To use early binding, you first need to set a reference in your project to
the application you want to manipulate. In the VB Editor of any Office
application, or in VB itself, you do this by selecting Tools + References,
and selecting the application you want from the list (e.g. “Microsoft Excel
8.0 Object Library”).
To create a new instance of Excel using early binding:
Dim oXL As Excel.Application
Set oXL = New Excel.Application
In either case, incidentally, you can first try to get an existing instance of
Excel, and if that returns an error, you can create a new instance in your
error handler.
Advantages of Early Binding
1. Your code will run considerably faster, because it can all be compiled
up front. With late binding, the code relating to an application you
declared as an object has to, in effect, be compiled as it runs.
2. Because your code can all be compiled up front, debugging is far
easier – select Debug + Compile, and the compiler will be able to
spot syntax errors which would have been missed had you used late
binding.
3. You have full access in your project to intellisense (type a keyword
and a dot to get a popup list of properties and methods supported by
that keyword, select one to insert it; type a keyword and press F1 to
launch the Help topic on that keyword).
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Early vs. Late Binding http://word.mvps.org/fAQs/InterDev/EarlyvsLateBinding.htm

4. You have full access to the application's object model via the Object
Browser and VBA Help.
5. You have access to the application's built-in constants. For instance,
if you are automating Word from Excel, you can use:
Dim objWord As Word.Application
Set objWord = New Word.Application

With objWord
.Visible = True
.Activate
.WindowState = wdWindowStateMaximize
.Documents.Open ("c:\temp\temp.doc")
End With

Furthermore, when you type

.WindowState =

you'll get a pop-up list of the supported constants, and can simply
pick “wdWindowStateMaximize” from the list.
If you used late binding, you would need to use:
.WindowState = 1

.. and you would need to know (by looking it up in Word's Object

Browser) that the value of the constant “wdWindowStateMaximize”
happens to be 1.
All this makes programming using early binding immeasurably easier than
using late binding.

Advantages of Late Binding

1. The main advantage is that code which uses late binding is more
certain to be version-independent
If you set a reference in a Word 97 project to “Microsoft Excel 8.0
Object Library”, then the project will run OK on a machine which has
Office 2000 installed. Word 2000 changes the reference on the fly to
the “Microsoft Excel 9.0 Object Library”.
But as they famously say, YMMV. Problems have been found in
certain circumstances. For instance, if you run a Word 97 project
containing a reference to the Excel 8.0 object library on a machine
with Office 2000 installed, it will run OK, but you may get the
occasional “cannot open macro storage” error unless you save the
project in Word 2000. If you do save it in Word 2000, the reference
will change to the Excel 9.0 object library. So if you use early binding
and support a mixed environment, it may be safest to create
separate Word 97 and Word 2000 versions of your addins, despite
the maintenance overhead.

2. The more references your project contains, the larger the file size
and the longer it takes to compile.
3. Some programming environments don't allow you to create
references to another application.

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Summary
Personally, as someone who finds programming difficult at the best of
times, I would never dream of using late binding – why make life harder
for yourself than it has to be? But some programming geniuses prefer to
use late binding, because of the peace of mind it gives them regarding
version independence – or maybe some of them just enjoy the challenge!
<g> But you pays your money and makes your choice ...
To those unfortunate souls using programming environments in which you
have to use late binding, all I can say is: Look on the bright side – you
could have ended up as an Assembly language programmer ...

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