Hi, yes the next version of Office will take advantage of .NET (Office 2007), although I'm not sure how they are going to do it. I'm under the impression that there might not be a development IDE and instead you need to use Visual Studio for development.

You can use .NET right now for developing with Office. There is a Visual Studio addin pack, VSOT (Visual Studio Office Tools) I think it's called that lets you develop SmartDocuments and other things. It's fairly expensive so I haven't tried it out.

You don't even need to use that either, you can use COM Interop to get VBA to call .NET assemblies. I wrote an article about it on my old blog . http://dsmyth.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_dsmyth_archive.html The code examples aren't there though. I'll try and remember to port it, and the examples, across to my new blog.