Visual Studio Office Development (VSOD) Support Team

Office 2013 introduced many changes to the backstage. In this blog post we will see how Office 2013 backstage can be customized using the backstage XML. The list of idMso’s for Office 2013 can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download...

VB6 based add-ins have a dependency on the Add-In Designer Object Library (msaddndr.dll), which is no longer shipped with Office 2013 ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178954.aspx see under OSF section). If the add-in setup project did not...

This post is by Yeshwanth Channaraj. There is a well-documented sample program, DSOFile , that enables reading and writing Office document properties (both old format files like *.xls, *.doc and *.ppt, as well as the new open xml formats like *.xlsx...

In this blog post we will talk about some common errors related to VSTO 3.0 and 4.0. For VSTO 2.0 related issues you can check out the blog post Troubleshooting common vsto issues part 1 . Common Error 1: Customization fails to load while opening...

This blog post talks about the common issues related to the VSTO customization failure errors and their possible solutions. Both document as well as application level customizations will be covered here. For the sake of clarity, this blog post is divided...

Suppose you have a VSTO 3.0 add-in for Excel, which performs some Excel object model calls. You notice that it works fine with less number of object model calls but starts failing when the number of object model calls is huge. Eg. You may be iterating...

You may see "ArgumentOutOfRange" exception for no apparent reason when using WPF controls in Microsoft Project 2010 add-in. Specifically, you will see exception with a call stack similar to below :- System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: The parameter...

Microsoft Word Automation clients cannot set the duplex print flag before a print job starts in Microsoft Office Word. Although a parameter in the PrintOut method indicates that there is support for duplex printing, the parameter does not provide true...

Many Office developers report performance issues with loading Office add-ins (VSTO add-ins or Shared add-ins) but most of the time delay is due to external factors. This blog post tries to list possible reasons for delay in add-in load. 1).Net Cold...

One of the needs to use Open XML SDK is to create documents on server side. In case of Open XML, it is recommended to create a document from another one rather than creating a document from scratch. After creating a copy of a document, you can modify...

Suppose you are developing a PowerPoint add-in and want to use the PresentationCloseEvent to present users with a custom dialog to save the presentation only if the new presentation contains valid changes to be saved. Here is a code snippet from one...

Few days back I worked on an issue where a Word 2007 VSTO document solution, developed using VSTO 3.0, was behaving erratically when VSTO 4.0 was installed on the same machine. The Word document was very simple, it just had a Rich Text content control...

  Microsoft Office Excel provides a worksheet function, RealTimeData (RTD). This function enables you to call a Component Object Model (COM) Automation server  provides you with a way to view and update data in real time. This real-time data...

Issue: Suppose you have an Excel XML file and you try to open it in inside an Internet Explorer 32 bit version(by drag drop), it opens just fine in Excel on a Microsoft Office 2010 machine. But if you try to open the same XML file inside a 64 bit version...

Few days back i worked on a problem where a VSTO addin was failing to load after VSTO 4.0 SP1 was installed on the machine. This addin was reading some data from its application configuration file. There was some error during the load of the addin and...

  Recently I worked on a problem where the Visual Basic 6 (VB6) Smart tags were not working with Word 2010 and PowerPoint 2010. The same VB6 smart tags work fine in Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. The issue was, when we right click a term (which the...

Few days back, one of my colleague asked me for my help for a requirement to convert an Excel 97-2003 Workbook to an OpenXML based workbook . Although it may sound pretty easy, the catch was that the file to be converted had around millions of rows (you...

Recently I encountered a not so common [;-)] scenario while working with Word 2007: If you have a Word 97-2003 format document which also has an alternate data stream associated with it, converting this document to the newer file format (DOCX file...

Recently I came across a problem where a customer was looking for the ways to call a function in an VSTO office add-in using keyboard shortcuts. Since I could not find good documentation on it, I decided to document my findings. One can implement these...

If you build a managed component that loads into Office application’s(Word, Excel , PowerPoint) process space, and the managed code uses the PIA (or a custom IA using event delegates) to sink events on the Application object, that application’s instance...

Recently I worked on a scenario where customer wanted to set the Document Editing Restrictions in Word 2007 using Open XML SDK 2.0. Document Editing Restrictions is nothing but Review | Protect Documents | Restrict Formatting and Editing option in MS...

Update (8 Feb 2013):- The sample code has been fixed for issues where it did not correctly delete all defined names and calculation cells. Recently I worked on a scenario where a user wanted to delete a worksheet from a workbook using Open XML SDK 2.0...

Symptoms: While programming PowerPoint 2007 in .Net, when you try setting Footer text for slides, you may encounter the following error message, Error Message: HeaderFooter (unknown member) : Invalid request. Cause This is a known...

You may have come across this blog which demonstrates how you can capture Excel’s quit event from an Add-In (in process). This post will be about capturing Excel’s quit event when you are externally automating Excel. Consider this situation – You have...

Symptoms: If you have customized Document inspector for Word 2007 using IDocumentInspector interface, after running the Document Inspector on the document and then exiting out of Word, will leave an instance of the application in memory Cause...