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...

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...

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...

I just posted an interview with Kris Makey on Channel9 . Kris is a Developer on the Office Client team. Here he shows us a couple new features of Office projects in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 . First he demonstrates a new error logging feature that will log...

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can now add smart tags to Excel by using an add-in. In this video, I show you how to add them to both a document-level customization and an add-in project. How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks...

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...

Yeah! Service Pack 1 is released to the web! Now what do I do? I'd like to help you navigate the information we published about SP1. I strongly recommend that you read the VSTO section of the SP1 Readme here . You can read about all the great improvements...

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...

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...

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...

Our team is looking for feedback on how we can improve the deployment experience for VSTO document solutions. We are interested in hearing how you deploy your Excel spreadsheet/template and Word document/template solutions today & what sorts of improvements...

Updated August, 2008 I'd like to give you some insight into how we decide what goes into a Service Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio. I'm speaking specifically about how the VSTO team built SP1; most other groups within Visual Studio use the same process...

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...

All of the Visual Studio and .NET Framework hotfixes that are publicly available on MSDN Code Gallery are now localized in the following languages: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian...

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...

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...

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...

Many customers have requested how to specify options like a Product or Publisher Name for Office 2007 VSTO solutions deployed from Visual Studio 2008. However, you cannot specify these properties in the Visual Studio IDE. In this post, I will describe...

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...

So you just want to write some code to format a cell in a worksheet. However, there isn't a help topic in sight that shows you how to do it. There may be a topic out there, but you don't have time to sift through the web searching for it. You're not alone...

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...

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...

You can now read the long awaited whitepapers about deploying Office 2007 solutions with a Visual Studio 2008 Setup project to create a Windows Installer package. These whitepapers show you how to complete the following tasks: Configure prerequisites...

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...

Visual Studio 2008 allows a developer to create add-in projects that target Microsoft Office 2003 products even if Microsoft Office 2007 rather than Microsoft Office 2003 is installed.  So long as you don’t close and reopen the project, everything...