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...

Recently I worked on a scenario where a user wanted to delete a worksheet from a workbook using Open XML SDK 2.0. The worksheet may contains some formulas, defined names, pivot tables etc… Though MSDN provides a code snippet which explains how to delete...

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...

Symptoms: Consider a scenario where you have a VSTO 3.0 add-in for Excel 2007 that loads up a WPF control in a custom task pane as a context menu. You have also subscribed to the MenuClick event for each item of the Context Menu. The context menu is displayed...

Symptoms: Consider a scenario where you have developed a Document level customization for Excel 2007 using Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0 and you have customized the default tab (TabAddIns) to add any Office Ribbon control. You will notice that the...

Consider a scenario where we have a VSTO add-in and an automation add-in for Excel and we want to share some objects from the VSTO addin to the Automation add-in. Because the VSTO add-in is loaded in its own separate appdomain and the automation add-in...

In Excel VBA, we could use RefEdit control on a user form for allowing users to select a cell range on worksheets. This control allows users to select a range easily just by dragging on Excel cells and it can be passed as an input (as range object) to...

We know Word Object model provides an event handler called Application_Quit, which will be triggered when the application quits, but we don’t have any such events for Excel (even for PowerPoint and some other Office applications). In order to workaround...

OLE object controls such as Command button, Checkbox, etc., allow us to call VBA code behind using OnAction property. However, when a situation arises that we have to call .Net code behind, we cannot use OnAction property, because this property requires...

Create a Word VSTO application level project for Word using Visual Studio 2008/2005 (For VS 2005, you need to install VSTO SE ). To do that, go to File Menu in VS -->New-->Project-->Expand Office hive-->Select Word 2007 Add-in Add a...

Let’s say you have a password protected Excel workbook, and you are calling following function through VBA in it: Sheet.Unprotect Password:= "" If you run this macro in Office 2007 RTM or SP1 version, it will result in a VBA Error; provided the actual...

If you are working with Charts programmatically in Excel 2007 Service Pack 2, and are trying to set the formatting of individual characters of Data Labels of charts programmatically, you will notice that the formatting gets applied to the whole of Data...

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION Consider this scenario. You are adding VSTO customizations dynamically to Word 2003/Excel 2003 documents using ServerDocument.AddCustomization method.  The ServerDocument.AddCustomization method succeeds. But when you try to open...

Summary When the print command of a PowerPoint Presentation is issued, the presentation.close event is fired in addition to the Print event・  However, the expected behavior is that the presentation.close event should not get fired when the print...