Office Automation | REALbasic 2005:

How is REALbasic different than Visual Basic for Applications?

The syntax REALbasic uses for Office Automation is very similar to Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). One difference between the two is that REALbasic is not built into Office, thus allowing you to create software that can operate independently of Office. In addition, REALbasic has extended capabilities, such as Internet and database access that VBA does not provide.

Okay, admittedly it's been a while since I've VBA'd in Office (it's almost always easier for me to start in VB-land), but I'm confident you can do both of the examples (Internet and dbms access) Real Software has listed, above, with VBA on Windows. Perhaps they mean the subset of VBA that's supported on the Mac? Last I checked, Office on OS X came with a small RealBasic bundle for one to use when automating, so I'm not real sure what they're trying to say.

Unfortunately it appears, and I can't really tell as my trial license is up again before I could put in more than thirty minutes of play, that you can't embed a Word 'control' in RealBasic (REALbasic?) the way you can with VB6 and VB.NET. Having a custom Word UI that de-emphasizes Word (that is, not adding toolbar after toolbar to Word with VBA but surrounding the edit control only with customized widgets) is a very nice feature I'd like to have on OS X.