Posts Tagged ‘COM add-ins’
Range Selection in Excel add-ins – other good manners for developers
Eugene Starostin | March 22nd, 2013
In my yesterday's article I started to muse on Excel's Range Selection and what can be considered good practices for Excel add-in developers. Well, there are some other good manners for the Range Selection. And if you have a closer look at the user interface of Microsoft Excel itself and some popular Excel add-ins, you will find out pretty convenient behavior of the Range Selection functionality like follows below... Read the rest of this entry →
Range Selection in Excel add-ins – good manners for developers
Eugene Starostin | March 21st, 2013
Having been fully absorbed in developing our frameworks for a while, I lost any connection with the other part of our business - ablebits.com. Doh, I shouldn't have allowed this to happen. I clearly realized that on last Saturday evening when, to the wailing of snow storm Xavier raging across this country, I installed the latest version of the Excel Ultimate Suite on my laptop... Read the rest of this entry →
Office 2013 add-ins & Visual Studio 2012: Getting started for VSTO developers
Pieter van der Westhuizen | March 18th, 2013
So you've been using Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) for some time now and luckily you've discovered a better and easier way to develop Office add-ins, namely Add-in Express. Ready to start a new happier life of creating awesome Office Outlook extensions you excitedly fire up Visual Studio and hit File, New Project... Read the rest of this entry →
Excel 2013 single document interface (SDI): How to rebuild your task panes to support it
Pieter van der Westhuizen | February 28th, 2013
If you're an avid user of Excel, you would've noticed that Excel 2013 has moved from being a Multi document interface (MDI) application to being a Single document interface (SDI) application... Read the rest of this entry →
How to preserve the ribbon control state (or, if you develop custom Outlook ribbons…)
Ty Anderson | January 30th, 2013
If you decide to build an Outlook add-in, you're going to want to customize the user interface. If you start customizing the Outlook user interface, you'll probably build a custom ribbon. If you build a custom Outlook ribbon, you'll want to put some controls on it like a button that toggles, a checkbox, and a drop down control
... Read the rest of this entry →
How to dynamically bind Outlook add-in UI elements to the context
Pieter van der Westhuizen | January 29th, 2013
Something that I've noticed is that if you want to really start bending Microsoft Outlook to your programming will, you need to start embracing and combining the use of message classes and content types when developing Outlook add-ins... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating a shared ribbon for Office 2013: Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Ty Anderson | January 17th, 2013
In this article, I want to show you how can create single Microsoft Office 2013 and 2010 ribbon and share it with Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. This scenario is one of many where Add-in Express shines. Using the Add-in Express framework, you can easily build a shared ribbon in a matter of minutes. Best of all, you can also quickly configure your controls to display (or not to display) in the Office host applications your add-in targets... Read the rest of this entry →
Add-in Express for Office and Delphi VCL adds support for Delphi XE3
Dmitry Kostochko | December 21st, 2012
Some of you probably noticed that we added support for Delphi XE3 in Security Manager for Microsoft Outlook as early as in November and you were probably asking yourself why we didn't support XE3 in our main Delphi component - Add-in Express for Office and Delphi VCL... Read the rest of this entry →
How to create custom Outlook rules and execute them programmatically: C# example
Pieter van der Westhuizen | December 13th, 2012
The Microsoft Outlook Rules is a very powerful feature that can sometimes get lost amongst the myriad other features and abilities of Outlook. Many Outlook programmers do not realise that Microsoft introduced a new rules object model in Outlook 2007 allowing developers to harness the power of Outlook rules... Read the rest of this entry →
How to replace built-in Outlook dialogs with custom forms
Pieter van der Westhuizen | December 5th, 2012
Years ago I found this article by Helmut Obertanner on CodeProject. In this article Helmut explains how you can replace the built-in Outlook Address book dialog with your own form. I was amazed and intrigued! This approach is a great way to provide your users with a custom address form that is able to retrieve contact address information from literally any source e.g. CRM or customer database... Read the rest of this entry →
How to merge several Office add-in projects into one binary
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 27th, 2012
Before we have a look at the sample project, let's first examine the scenario for when you might want to consider using this approach. In the case of the Ultimate Suite for Excel, loading was a crucial factor, by following this approach the team effectively reduced the loading time by nearly 60%, because only one assembly needs to be loaded instead of 20+ separate ones
... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating modular Office add-ins using Add-in Express
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 19th, 2012
When creating a new Office extension with Add-in Express for Office and .net you have the option to design your entire add-in user interface using our visual designers, by simply dropping the various components on the design surface of the AddinModule. This is fine for most Office add-ins especially when you do not require a […]... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating WiX installation projects for VSTO-based Office add-ins
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 13th, 2012
In the last two articles, I've shown you how to create a WiX installer for Add-in Express based add-ons from scratch and how to convert your existing setup projects to WiX. In this blog, I'll show you how to create a WiX installer for Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) based Office add-in projects... Read the rest of this entry →
HowTo: Create add-ins for Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 with a shared ribbon tab
Eugene Astafiev | November 5th, 2012
Office developers need to merge the UI of their add-ins into a single ribbon tab. Just imagine the following scenario: a user wants to install a few COM add-ins from the same vendor. Are they going to get a separate ribbon tab for each add-in's UI?... Read the rest of this entry →
Create custom Outlook menus: VB.NET and C# for Outlook 2013-2003
Ty Anderson | October 22nd, 2012
It looks like Microsoft is going to go ahead and release Office 2013 sooner rather than later. I suppose you can argue they already have with the recent pre-ordering of Windows Surface (which comes with Office 2013 RT). Whether or not you consider Office 2013 RT to really be Office is up to you. It can be your opinion
... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating WiX setup project for Office add-ins on Visual Studio 2012 using Add-in Express
Pieter van der Westhuizen | October 17th, 2012
If you've switched to Visual Studio 2012, you might have noticed that Microsoft has sneakily removed all Visual Studio Installer project types. Instead of the usual Setup Project, Setup Wizard, CAB Project and Merge Module Project templates, the only option we now have is to use the limited edition of InstallShield.... Read the rest of this entry →