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You can search the text in any open Microsoft Office Word document for specific strings if you put the code in an application-level add-in. When you find an instance of the string, you can perform some action on it. This video shows how to flag the string with a comment that contains text passed in from...

When you build an add-in project, it installs the add-in on your development computer. Even if you close that project and start another, or even close Visual Studio entirely, all add-ins you have built will still run when you start the Office application on that computer. If you're not expecting the...

You can easily customize the Ribbon to show only the controls you want to display. This video shows how to clear the Ribbon in Microsoft Office Word so it contains only a single button. The button inserts a graphic into the open Word document at the cursor location. Why? Well, really it's just to demo...

It doesn't take much code to add a command to a shortcut menu in Excel, but the menu objects have strange names so it's not intuitive, to me at least. The trickiest part is just sorting out how it's supposed to work, because it seems like it should be different from adding buttons to toolbars, but it...

A lot of people would like to do this. It makes sense that a developer would want to select the custom tab automatically, if the controls that are most useful for the current document are all on that tab. This video goes in-depth about this programming question. OK, not really. The video just says...

By default, Visual Studio automatically converts Office 2003 projects into Office 2007 projects when you open the project, if you have the 2007 Office system installed on your development computer. But you can change that default behavior. Resources Forum: Visual Studio 2008 converts its own Office 2003...

When you create a document-level customization for a document, all the copies of the document will be customized too. Even if you save a copy of the document with a different name, when the document is opened it'll try to find and run the code. All the saved data will still be there, it'll just pop up...

This video tells the story of someone who created an Excel 2003 workbook project in Visual Studio 2008.  No matter what configuration he tried on the client machine, he got this error when opening the workbook: The assembly could not be found or could not be loaded. Here's the setup: Windows XP...

You can override Ribbon commands and run your own code for Save or Save As, or you can simply cancel attempts to save a document in the DocumentBeforeSave event handler. Code and resources: Forum post: Microsoft Word 2007 Disable Save As Temporarily Repurpose Commands on the Office Fluent Ribbon...

A few months ago, Andrew Whitechapel wrote an article and sample application that demonstrates combining the native capabilities of an Office client application with the UI capabilities of WPF. Behind the UI, the application is connected to remote data and services via WCF and uses the RAD features of...

In this episode: a tip about setting the background color of a custom task pane to match the Office theme, and about calling functions in add-ins from other add-ins. Plus, Mary creates an Outlook add-in that helps her remember attachments. Duration: 5 minutes, 4 seconds Related resources for more information...

In this episode: a tip about saving and restoring the position of custom toolbars in Outlook 2007, and how to copy values from one worksheet and paste them in another. Plus, Mary finishes her Excel application and sends it to her boss in e-mail. Duration: 4 minutes, 33 seconds Related resources for more...

In this episode: a tip about serializing data in a Word document so users can't see it, and why content controls disappear from documents if you add them at run time. Plus, Mary customizes the Ribbon in Excel so her boss Kemp doesn't need to use button controls on the worksheet itself. Duration: 5 minutes...

This series focuses on development tasks that are common as part of developing Office solutions, and describes the tools in Visual Studio 2008 that help you do these tasks quicker. The series is organized as short, five-minute episodes that you can listen to while you drive, travel, exercise, eat lunch...

In this episode: a tip about how to save a new copy of a Word document instead of saving over the original, and how to create a class in an Outlook project to access methods without hitting the object model security prompts. Plus, Mary creates a quick data UI in Excel for her boss Kemp. Related resources...

This episode has a tip about adding controls to Word documents, a case file about how Canada Post solved its data entry problems, and what to do when an add-in doesn't run and there's no error message. ";" galleryimg="no" mce_src="http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/vsto/WindowsLiveWriter/MicrosoftOfficeDeveloperShowEpisode1_C0DD...

This series focuses on the main components or features of Visual Studio 2008 Professional that you can use for Office development. It's organized as short, five-minute episodes that you can listen to while you drive, travel, exercise, eat lunch, or whenever you usually listen to your portable MP3 player...

If you'd like a quick introduction to the main aspects of Office development using Visual Studio 2008 Professional, you can now get it while you drive, travel, exercise, eat lunch, or whenever you usually listen to your portable MP3 player. (Of course, you can also listen at your computer with your usual...