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I received an email from a customer the other day asking how to set up an Excel pivot table programmatically. The Excel OM exposes a number of objects and methods that you can use to create pivot tables, some more sophisticated than others. I wanted the
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In an earlier post , I talked about how you could delay (or prevent) the loading of managed code using a native add-in. In that post I also listed the standard LoadBehavior settings, and I was assuming that everyone knows how these apply, but I got a
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In my last post , I discussed how you could avoid any dependency on the Office PIAs by using ComImport to redefine the host application’s OM interfaces. Someone (A Developer) pointed out that I had actually omitted the trailing 2 members of the IRibbonControl
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In a previous post , I discussed how you could build an add-in for multiple versions of Office, and explained the problems in this approach (and why it is not officially supported). One of the reasons this is not supported is because you end up building
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In an earlier post , I looked at how you could morph a VSTO project for one application into a project for another application – specifically, how you could build a VSTO add-in for Access. Note that this is explicitly not supported. However, although
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People have been building native shared add-ins for Office (and related apps) since their introduction in Office 2000. People have been building managed shared add-ins since the introduction of .NET in 2002. VSTO support for managed add-ins was introduced
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Suppose you control your enterprise desktops to the extent that you control which add-ins are installed. Suppose, further, that you want to avoid the hit of loading the CLR at application startup. One way is to delay-load your managed add-ins. The registered
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Perusing the forums over the last few months, it’s clear that there’s some confusion about the various VSTO loader and runtime components. At the time of writing, there are 4 versions of VSTO in existence, including 4 sets of design-time tooling and 3.5
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Everyone knows you can build document-level Office solutions and you can build application-level Office add-ins. Suppose your requirements dictate that you build a solution that uses both techniques – can this be done? First, let’s pause and consider
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In my previous post , I looked at how the VSTO add-in model is flexible enough to be used in prototyping scenarios for versions of Office not yet released. In principle, the same applies to Office host applications that are not currently supported. VSTO
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Following on from my previous post , it should be clear that we've designed the VSTO Office add-in support to be optimally useful across multiple different Office host applications and spanning multiple Office versions. To be very clear, let me reiterate:
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Or, Prototyping VSTO Add-ins for Unsupported Office Versions/Applications It is in the nature of the VSTO 2005 SE and VSTO 2008 add-ins that they will run in multiple versions of Office. One of the main reasons for designing them this way is to mitigate
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There's an article in this month's MSDN magazine on building Office-based solutions using VSTO with WPF, WCF and LINQ. The point of the article is to affirm that all these disparate technologies do indeed work well together, and that the design-time experience
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Suppose you want to build a Ribbon customization, or a custom task pane, and you want to use this customization in multiple add-ins? For example, you might want to use the same customization in say an Excel add-in and a PowerPoint add-in. It's pretty
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Can you use WPF controls in VSTO solutions, and if so, how? VSTO's mission is to bring together the unmanaged Office platform and the managed development world. One aspect of this is the ability to build VSTO solutions that use managed controls within
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