Importing an application type library and using the resulting ActiveX wrapper functions are convenient and they can be accessed from in Visual LISP with features such as Apropos, but it comes at a cost.
Applications such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel contain hundreds of methods and properties, and creating wrappers for each of these adds up to significant memory usage. Also, you may need to use an ActiveX property or method for which there is no generated wrapper function. In this instance, and to avoid the overhead involved in importing a type library, you can use the following AutoLISP functions: