Question Can I Access Menu Items and Windows From other Applications in .NET

[craneium]

I am needing to be able to access excel and adobe acrobat menu items and popup Windows (mostly acrobat). Is there a way to do this besides using mouse clicks and sending key strokes (come on, this aint applescript). There are some menu actions I need to automate and I need to be able to discover if a window did open and if so I need to do things in it. If some one could point me in the right direction I would be very grateful.

 

[Tom]

You can automate Excel from inside VB. There is plenty of information if you google it.

For other programs in general, yes you can use API to control programs and there menu bars but that is alot of coding and subclassing to write for each specific program and screen in order to retrieve the handles for all the objects in each of the screens.