<p>I build VBA applications for both Word and Excel, is there any way to access the progress bar that sometimes appears in the Office status bar.</p>

I have not accessed the progress bar, but I have in the past used something like this to place task status text in the status bar...
```
```
Sub StatusBarExample()
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False 
    ' turns off screen updating
    Application.DisplayStatusBar = True 
    ' makes sure that the statusbar is visible
    Application.StatusBar = "Please wait while performing task 1..."
    ' add some code for task 1 that replaces the next sentence
    Application.Wait Now + TimeValue("00:00:02")
    Application.StatusBar = "Please wait while performing task 2..."
    ' add some code for task 2 that replaces the next sentence
    Application.Wait Now + TimeValue("00:00:02")
    Application.StatusBar = False 
    ' gives control of the statusbar back to the programme
End Sub
```
```