Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and VCL
Success stories

As Technical Architect and Lead Developer for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), I successfully used??? Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and VCL for the client-side portion of the Information Management System (IMS). The Add-in Express components allowed me to integrate my Delphi applications with Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint and with Java web services via Microsoft Internet Explorer. The result was a collaborative document management system that blended the following technologies:???

• Microsoft Office
• Delphi
• Java
• Zope
• PostgreSQL

Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and CodeGear VCL???was used to integrate the Delphi applications into the Microsoft Office suite via custom toolbars. One of the primary requirements of the Vancouver Olympics was to leverage the existing knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite within its staff for the new system, reducing the amount of training required to deploy the system to the end users and improving the chances of quick system adoption while reducing input errors. All of the difficult work related to programmatically integrating custom code into MS Office was taken care of by the Add-in Express???components and visual designers, leaving me to concentrate on the development of my custom code.

Due to both the globally distributed nature of VANOC’s staff and the variety of MS Office versions in use, writing and globally deploying MS Office add-ins that supported all variants of Microsoft???Office was a difficult and frustrating task. By using the Add-In Express components, the components are Office version-independent and are very easily deployed via setup applications or MSI applications. Bundled into MSI applications, VANOC was able to deploy the Add-in Express-enabled client applications overnight and system-wide without user intervention, ensuring that all staff were using the same application versions no matter where they were on the globe.

The project was a success and delivered on time and within budget due in no small part to the ease of use and stability of the Add-in Express???components. Throughout development and deployment, not a single error could be traced to the components despite some very complex processing and system integration demands. On those occasions when I required technical assistance with the components, Andrei Smolin and his staff responded quickly and ensured that I was on the right path. In my opinion, the Add-in Express staff provide some of the best technical support in the business.

I highly recommend the Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and CodeGear VCL components and continue to use them in my work.

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Add-in Express???components make developing with Outlook and the rest of the Office Suite just about as easy as it could be. Yes, you still have to understand the Office Suite's occasionally rather unintuitive object models, but the support team are absolutely superb in helping you on your way (have a look at the forums and see how quickly most questions get answered and resolved). With some vendors support you always wonder if you’re going to get a response and how useful it will be – but with Add-in Express I have absolutely no concerns that my query will be dealt with promptly, accurately and with great courtesy.

We use Add-in Express components extensively in developing database applications for a number of our clients, and without exception they love the fact that they can have seamless integration with Outlook - it's been a big selling point. Most office workers these days spend a huge amount of their time with Outlook open in front of them, and having to switch applications to perform any kind of task is a nuisance. So why not make all or some of your application's functionality available inside the Outlook shell? Property Desktop, our enterprise wide database system for commercial property, now includes a comprehensive Outlook addin. This means anybody who receives an email from a business contact can immediately see the full record for that client, including current jobs, future possibilities, and even who else in the company is corresponding with them. It means that a huge amount of client-related data can immediately be leveraged and presented to the user without them having to do anything except open an email.

I probably sound like I have shares in the company, but I’m just a very satisfied customer. Really, it's one of the best Delphi component investments we've ever made.

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I have been using Add-in Express since they released the first version. I was lucky to find Add-in Express when I decided to port an old add-in developed for Microsoft Word 97, using the old WordBasic system, to the Microsoft Word 2000 VBA system. Since then, I have been able to develop three new add-ins for Word and PowerPoint and I have yet three more in the pipeline due to be released in the next few months. In effect Add-in Express is the backbone of my micro-ISV.

Add-in Express is the ONLY solution on the market that enables Delphi programmers to take advantage of the productivity advantages offered by Delphi to develop full COM add-ins for Office. All the hassles involved in communicating with Office are handled transparently by the Add-in Express library, while I can develop the user interface and the functionality of the add-in using Delphi, as if it were a normal Windows application.

Furthermore, programming for the Office system is prone to encounter many glitches because controlling a third party system such as Office is a complex task. For that reason I really appreciate the superb customer support from the team at Add-in Express. They solve any issue reported to them in hours and they help locate errors caused by differences in Office versions and undocumented "features" in the various Office programs.

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Greetings from the UK! I’ve just put into beta testing some software written using Add-in Express. It’s been written for a firm of financial advisors who have, over the last few years, developed a mammoth spreadsheet that allows them to model a client’s financial position according to UK investment law (which means the model changes, sometimes rapidly, over time!), for both personal investment and for pension purposes. The weak links in the system (apart from the Excel solver add-in!) were a) the fact that a change to the model meant updating every spreadsheet for every client, and b) to get the investment portfolio information???required the manual transcription of every investment into the spreadsheet, plus a manual valuation of each stock, with all the possibilities of operator error.

Using your excellent software, I have written an add-in that presents the user with a simple toolbar within what is now a template Excel spreadsheet. The toolbar allows the creation of new models, the loading and saving of key client data to a non-Excel data file (thus allowing updates to the template to be performed independently of the data), and the extraction and valuation of the investment records from the financial management software. Several other functions have also been implemented using Add-in Express, the result of which has been to reduce the preparation time for each model from several hours down to a few seconds, and provide the ability to separate the data from the model, allowing the model to be varied at will.

I could not have done this without Add-in Express, and it has proven to be worth its weight in platinum!

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We are small company from Germany, specialized in tools and add-ons for Microsoft Outlook. Developing Outlook add-ins was always a difficult, complex and time consuming process. Writing code which is fast, reliable and easy to understand and to maintain was nearly impossible. The native ActiveX interface of Microsoft Office is far too complex to support an easy and fast development process. The result was programs with complex code which were hard to maintain and support.

All these problems have been???solved since we started to use Add-in Express! It provides us with an excellent framework doing all nasty work in the background. No more trouble with ActiveX interfaces, no more hours of debugging to find the source of some silly bugs, no more late work because of some unsolved problems. Of course this is hyperbolical, but not too much. Add-in Express is not the holy grail, but it is as close to it as a programming suite can be.

The fact is, that Add-in Express has made our work a lot easier. Creating the structure of a new Outlook add-in using Add-in Express takes only a few minutes. After that we do not have to worry about ActiveX any more, we only have to use the simple and well documented classes and tools of Add-in Express.

But what really makes Add-in Express stand out is the excellent support! The FAQs are always up to date and are complemented by a huge number of great and well documented demos. If this does not help, any type of question will find an excellent answer in the forum. If even this???does not???help, you will get individual and intensive support by email. Far too often good support is only an empty promise, but if there is a company keeping its word, it is Add-in Express.

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WRC Research Systems, Inc. has been writing statistical applications written for Excel since 1993. The applications have relied on Excel 5 macro language, VBA code, and C dll's. Over the years we have gotten increasingly concerned about the security of our code, since the VBA project password system is basically no protection at all.

While looking for a way to implement the new Office 2007 Ribbon interface for our BrandMap product, we discovered Add-in Express. This product allowed us to easily add a good looking and functional ribbon interface to our newest version. And it allowed us to provide a toolbar for earlier Excel versions.

Additionally, we were able to use our Delphi programming experience to make sure our VBA and Excel 5 macro code is kept secure until it is loaded into Excel. And while in Excel we have used Add-in Express's support for Excel events to further protect the code in the event of a "break in." Our registration code is now compiled and much less vulnerable than it was in VBA.

Add-in Express also solved another problem for us with our BrandTrend product. BrandTrend was initially a standard Delphi Win32 application developed specifically to produce trend charts of marketing research data. By using Add-in Express for VCL, we were able to develop a new product, BrandTrend XL, as an Excel COM add-in. Add-in Express furthermore allowed us to re-use 95% of our existing Delphi code and forms. Now, with BrandTrend XL, any data that can be gotten into Excel can be trended and analyzed by our Delphi analytic screens and forms.

Our experience with Add-in Express has been extremely positive - it works as advertised. The forums have been very helpful and response on the few questions we have had has been immediate and complete with project examples.

You can check out BrandMap, BrandTrend XL, and our other offerings at www.wrcresearch.com.

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My teacher asked me to write an addin for MS Outlook which could parse specific incoming e-mails and create calendar events for future synchronizing with his smartphone. First I tried to figure out the complex model of interaction with MS Outlook and almost cried when realized how much work I'll have to do. Then I asked my friend about some solution to my problem and he advised me to take a look at Add-in-Express components. That was amazing! It took me only couple of hours to understand how components work and by the end of the day the task has been solved!

The time of support response and the regularity of adding new features really impresses me a lot as well as adding support for new MS Office releases. Since then the Add-in-Express suite helps me for awesome quickly and extremely effective developing extensions for MS Office.

In my opinion, Add-in Express for VCL is number one VCL component set in the integration of two great ideas - a Rapid Application Development with Delphi and a outstanding capabilities with the end-user's extensions for MS Office! I like to use it and I think you will also like to use it if you want to make some wonderful add-in for MS Office.

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Recruitment Systems develops and promotes software to the global recruitment industry. As the Chief Technical Officer I have led a team of five developers to create our flagship product the TRIS Recruitment CRM. This recruitment database is fully integrated with Microsoft Outlook 2007 thanks to Add-in Express.

Our software development team have been using Add-in Express since 2004. We have found it to be a product with excellent features and superior performance. This product is backed by an exceptional support team who are always keen to help us if we have any problems. We often work in partnership with the Add-in Express to develop and re-develop our Outlook add-in. This creates a great deal of value for our clients and we benefit from greater customer satisfaction and better relationships with our 200 clients across 20 countries.

In 2004 we used Add-in Express to develop the add-in which is the cornerstone of our data collection system. The Add-in Express allowed us to develop the TRIS Outlook Add-in which saves our clients several hours of data entry time each day. This has given our promotions and product demonstrations a significant competitive advantage. Ever since 2004, our competitors have been trying to catch up with us.

In the near future we plan to rewrite our VCL Add-in to .NET. We will use Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and .NET to quickly get our software to our customers. As a relatively small software development company, we need the best tools to save time and get our products to market quickly. Add-in Express is one of these key tools. Without your product we may not be able to meet our strict deadlines. Thanks to Add-in Express we do not have to spend as many man hours on coding. This saves us money and also frees up our team to work on new features and products.

We have just upgraded to the 2009 version of Add-in Express which promises to be even more useful and intuitive. I am excited about the many opportunities this upgrade opens for our company. We strongly recommend Add-in Express to developers in small businesses like ours and developers in larger firms. Add-in Express has kept us at the leading edge of software development and it is clear that our success wouldn't be possible without it.

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As head of the management department, one of my tasks is domain management. Varying from buying, checking, updating and many other tasks, managing over 2000 domains is quite the challenge. There had always been those little but so useful features Office could not offer us and in the years we already got used to it: managing of domains involved many reoccurring tasks, which weren't only prone to errors but also took hours and hours of our time because of the fact we could not automate them.

At some point we even considered hiring an extra person to take care of the issues that Office itself failed to. Having a few years of programming experience with Delphi, I had read of the interaction between Delphi add-ins and the Office package. Building add-ins, which took care of our own specific problems, was yet another challenge.

It took me ages to simply create a single working button in Excel, powered by Delphi. After spitting through dozens of HowTo tutorials and online message boards, Add-in Express's approach and examples mesmerized me and their components caught my attention. Was it really that simple?

My employer was skeptical, hence, domain management and its tedious tasks were right up my alley, not his. I decided to give it a go and indeed, it was just as simple as that! I knew I was on the right track with these components but ran into a minor problem, so I contacted Add-in Express Customer Support, who responded the day after with as little as a single line of code and there it was: my first Excel add-in, which saved me hours and hours of work! Instead of hiring someone I now had my own add-in which I could keep on modifying, updating just as required by our team.

Mind me, this first issue involved searching and exporting results. Normally I searched countless (up to 25 sometimes!) sheets for a certain string, copied the result to another sheet, removed the duplicates and created a text file with all occurrences of the string. This task could simply reoccur 4 or 5 times a day. Just as my employer asked me to.

Currently I enter the search string into a newly created edit box, press the button and my addin searches all sheets, removes all duplicates and asks me whether to export the result to a text file! All within but a few seconds! Thank you Add-in Express, I'm already working on my next addin project!

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We are using Add-in Express to easily integrate functionality in Microsoft Office applications, which otherwise need months of studies, programming and maintenance efforts. Add-in Express works pretty well, and if there is a potential problem, then the forum and the support through email works great to quickly find a solution. Even if the problem is not directly related to Add-in Express, but due to a lack of understanding of the Microsoft Office internals, the Add-in Express team is of great support to solve the problem.

Our first attempts to develop Office integrated functionality with Delphi cost us quite a lot of resources, and the developed solutions where most of the time hard to maintain - whenever a new Microsoft Office suite is out, extensive testing and code modifications were required. After some review of Microsoft Office integrated developer solutions for Delphi the selection quickly ended with Add-in Express. The testing went quick and we were so enthusiastic that in shortest time the first application was ready and the customer was mostly surprised.

Since then we've had only positive experience. Problems get solved by a reliable and competent prater, Add-in Express Ltd. Altogether, it can't be easier than with such a long standing and supportive partner.

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