Why should I learn COM?

Question

Lately I'm hearing much about COM at my work. I also learnt that COM is old. COM is deprecated. There is no future for COM. Are these true too?

I want to learn COM because I want to know what is the big fuss about it, but I'm unable to convince myself that this is a solid reason for spending so much time and learning it.

So, Can any one tell me:

1. Why should I learn COM?
2. Once I learn COM what can I do using it? I mean its applications.

Answer 1

I just don't see COM going away any time soon. If you want to be a windows expert, you must understand how it works.

Answer 2

Learning COM (or at least being au fait with its concepts) means you can integrate with thousands of existing components, including Microsoft Word and Excel.

I work largely in the Java domain, but having a little knowledge of COM means I can interface effectively to Word and Excel (in particular) to programatically create/read documents. I don't have an in depth knowledge, but I have a little, and having that increases my productivity substantially.