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 Start – There could be some delay due to time...

  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 (RTD) feature is great for working with constantly...

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 of Internet explorer, you will find the xml...

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 read it right, Millions!). If we go by the standard...

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 format) in Word 2007 may result in the loss of the...

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 may encounter problems when used for OLE embedding...

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 an application that automates Excel and presents...

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 is loaded in the different(default) appdomain, sharing...

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 the program. It is very beneficial for users while...

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 this issue, first thing that will come in our mind...

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 a VBA macro to be assigned. In such situations...

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 password is not an empty string. However, in SP2...

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 Label instead of the specific character/range. ...

Scenario: A client makes a call into a custom library function. Library function in turn makes a call to an external web service/WCF service by using add service reference and throws an exception. This is very common in Excel UDF, Office customizations where reusable components/DLLs/Library...