Good program to learn office development?

Looking for a guru's opinion here...

I'm wanting to learn to do some applications that use office.

Is an email client to big of a project to takle early on?
Excel programming was pretty simple. But an email client would require contacts and folders, plus I'd actually have to send out email with attachments etc... ;) - a little more involved. But is it too involved?

I'm also looking at writing an app that can create, edit and delete word files which seems more complicated that excel? (though I haven't finished an app that can edit .xls files yet either.)

Anyway, where should I start?

Thanx.

An email client? Using Outlook Object Model to create your own email client seems redundant? If you were using vb6 only to create an email client then you will run intoissues like pop3 vs imap, authentication, headers, and needing an SMTP server to connect to or use whatever the user has like hotmail, yahoo, etc.

I would suggest finishing one project before going on to another. Word is a bit easy but hard when it involves multiple pages, tables, graphics, etc.