interface with office

hi,

does anyone know how to access information stored within the controls of a ms office application. For example, if a user had an email open in outlook, or a project open in ms project, how would you go about extracting the information from the fields on the screen.

Also, is there anyway of being able to tell when a user has deleted or added a value to a field in either of these application - which activates a function in our vb app. Would a macro be the way to go?


Thanks heaps,
uni