Posts Tagged ‘Excel’
Add-in Express and Windows hooks
Andrei Smolin | July 27th, 2021
Once in a couple of years Microsoft contacts us on this or that topic. The last topic was the Excel performance on Windows Desktop. They demonstrated a case where enabling an Add-in Express add-in produced an astounding 90-second delay when selecting another cell while Excel was busy with some long calculation... Read the rest of this entry →
Inner details of DPI scaling in Office COM add-ins
Andrei Smolin | June 17th, 2021
Today, I’m following Microsoft recommendations and using code fragments they provide to investigate the behavior of a System.Windows.Forms.Form (simply a form)... Read the rest of this entry →
Office COM add-ins and DPI awareness: research and analysis
Andrei Smolin | June 10th, 2021
In the first blog of this series, I showed issues related to using several monitors with different DPIs. To get an explanation of those pretty confusing results, let’s check resources available on the web.... Read the rest of this entry →
Issues with Windows mutli-DPI scaling and Office COM add-in panes and forms
Andrei Smolin | May 25th, 2021
Quite often these days you see this configuration: a notebook and an external display or two connected to the notebook. All these displays may have different DPIs. This is a typical environment where DPI-related issues reveal themselves. ... Read the rest of this entry →
Releasing COM objects: Garbage Collector vs. Marshal.RelseaseComObject
Andrei Smolin | July 20th, 2020
Just recently we've got a comment declaring one of our blogs on releasing COM objects "wrong and misleading": the author says Marshal.ReleasingComObject() and related things made him spend "lots of time on writing code that is totally unnecessary" and provides many links supporting the idea that you can use GC.Collect() to get rid of non-released COM objects.... Read the rest of this entry →
New version of Add-in Express sample COM add-in projects
Andrei Smolin | July 1st, 2020
Quick news: we've developed a new version of sample COM add-in projects that we provide in the downloadable archive on the Add-in Express .NET Downloads page... Read the rest of this entry →
Range.Replace() problems in all Excel versions
Andrei Smolin | February 21st, 2018
Range.Replace() and supposedly Range.Find() may work incorrectly in a scenario we describe on the Excel for Developers forum. A workaround is: change Range.Value directly... Read the rest of this entry →
Add-in Express for Office issues on multiple monitors with different DPI settings
Andrei Smolin | December 20th, 2017
Microsoft has published Office 2016 build 8828.2010 through its Office Insider update channel. That build supports multiple monitors with different DPI settings; the support relies on the API changes provided by Windows 10 Creators Update.... Read the rest of this entry →
Excel 2016 crashes if COM add-in creates a command bar control in a built-in context menu
Andrei Smolin | December 7th, 2017
Today's blog is about a recent crash reported by our customer. Our research shows that the crash occurs if your VSTO add-in or COM add-in creates a command bar control on a built-in context menu. We reproduce the crash when customizing the Cells context menu in this way... Read the rest of this entry →
Localization of Office add-ins using forms-based resources
Dmitry Kostochko | December 20th, 2016
The article describes how to create a localized version of an Office add-in by using regular forms-based resources without having to apply them manually to each component, form or control... Read the rest of this entry →
How to customize the appearance of advanced task panes and Outlook regions
Alexander Solomenko | May 31st, 2016
Starting with version 8.2, Add-in Express began to open its internal infrastructure, which allows developers to customize some areas of advanced Excel, Word and PowerPoint task panes and Outlook regions. In the new release, it becomes possible to customize the header together with its controls as well as splitter and border. You can also modify the appearance of a minimized region, control the header visibility, change padding, get HitTest info and more... Read the rest of this entry →
Office 365 API – Querying Exchange
Pieter van der Westhuizen | July 13th, 2015
Today, we'll investigate how to retrieve data such as contacts, calendar entries and e-mails from Exchange. We'll create a simple Excel add-in, using our favourite Office development toolset, Add-in Express for Office and .net, which will import Exchange e-mails, contacts and calendar events into the active Excel workbook... Read the rest of this entry →
Office context menu add-in for Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint
Andrei Smolin | April 15th, 2015
The blog is about an add-in (with the source code) that adds a button to all context menus of Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio and Word in Office 2010-2013. The button shows the name of the context menu.... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating an Excel Stock Information RTD server using the Yahoo Finance API
Pieter van der Westhuizen | September 25th, 2014
In today's article, we'll write an Excel RTD server that returns the latest stock prices and other information. In case you're not familiar with Excel RTD servers, it is used to communicate with a real-time data source, such as stock quotes and provide the user with a constant flow of changing data... Read the rest of this entry →
Excel Online & Google Sheets for developers – what’s the difference?
Pieter van der Westhuizen | May 20th, 2014
In the last few weeks we've covered a lot of aspects of both Google Sheets and Excel Online and we've seen that both platforms offer developers various options to customize and integrate with. In this article we'll evaluate what we've learned so far about Google Sheets and Excel Online and compare the two platforms and what it means for developers
... Read the rest of this entry →
Google add-ons vs Microsoft Office Apps: Read/Write tests
Pieter van der Westhuizen | April 10th, 2014
We've been spending a lot of time with the Office/Productivity offerings from Google (Google Drive/Docs/Sheets) and Microsoft (Office 365, SharePoint, Word, Excel) and both of these two platforms have some drawbacks, but also some redeeming factors... Read the rest of this entry →