Creating COM add-ins for MS Office Outlook, Excel, Word with pleasure

I have been using Add-in Express for Office and .net for a decade, and it is the single most important program I have, other than Visual Studio itself.

I am an independent software developer, and for anything related to Office, my first step is to create a new single Add-In Express COM add-in project for all of the relevant Office applications. I can do in 40 minutes what would otherwise take a day or two.

Your software has been invaluable over the years and many of my clients have purchased it based on my recommendation, and they all love it. Not a single complaint. You have a great product.

I would just like to take a second to say, "Thank you!" to all of the Add-in Express staff. For the past 18 months or so, I have moved from a corporate job to independently developing custom software primarily in MS Outlook.

Using your amazing products, I have roughly cut development time by 25% and my end users have a more stable experience, too. Additionally, I would like to congratulate you on providing the best developer support I have ever experienced. Time and again, your team goes above and beyond the call of duty to provide custom examples. The "other guys" tend to make you feel like a moron when you ask a question that seems basic or of a beginner level. You have always treated me, and as far as I can tell, everyone else with the utmost respect.

Thanks again for giving us all an example of what true professionalism looks like.

Add-in Express is the greatest tool for Office COM programming. First and foremost, superb code, and numerous examples to get you started quickly. But, beyond that, the quality of the technical support provided by Add-in Express Team alone is worth a pot of gold in itself! We were able to develop a project in no time, and always got great response any time we needed it. Way to go!

You have one very happy customer! I have installed Add-in Express and within 15 minutes I have the framework for my Outlook Add-in running - all I need to do now is copy the forms and code from my failed VS/Extensibility/COM project and it'll be in there. What I've spent weeks doing with Visual Studio, Extensibility and COM Add-ins, I've just done in 15 minutes with Add-in Express (and the excellent web based documentation). It even works in Outlook 2010, my "other" project only worked in 2007 and I bet this new project does too, and Outlook/XP and Outlook 2000!

It's hard to say how pleased I am without jumping around :) I can't thank you enough, this purchase has paid for itself instantly.

Davton have been creating custom business solutions for Microsoft Outlook for a number of years. Since discovering Add-in Express, we have been able to focus on the business end of the process and not worry about the actual integration.

We love ClickTwice installation, and your forum is invaluable. I hope we manage to match your level of customer service for our own customers - its truly awesome.

We use Add-in Express on all our add-ins now. Our latest product - MailChimp provides synchronisation between the MailChimp email marketing lists, and Outlook contacts lists.

Add-in Express is a powerful suite of tools for creating code that interfaces with Microsoft Office products. We have created software in the past that works with Office using the ActiveX interface, and we have always dreaded it. Anyone will tell you, that learning the technical details of writing bulletproof code which works with Office's ActiveX interfaces, is a painfully tedious and time consuming task.

Add-in Express has changed all that for us. Writing Add-ins takes less than one third of the time it used to take us, and we are free of the burden of mastering the arcane twists of Office's ActiveX interfaces. We now look forward to creating add-ins. Support from Add-in Express Team has always been prompt and helpful, and every problem we have had has been solved, promptly.

Your product opened the door to an entire new way to implement our top down editing approach. Best of all, the access to new customers required only a small amount of new code to be witten. It took only days to have several new applications to sell. Hats off to your developers.

As good as your prodct is, your support is even better. Andrei Smolin is both knowledgable and patient. He is the reason I am and will continue to be your customer.

I have run software development companies for over twenty years and know great customer support and solid code is the only way to go. Your company scores high marks in both areas.

In case you're wondering, we're very happy customers! Your product has proven to be very well-written and stable, and your Premium support has been worth many times what we paid.

Many such goodies already exist, such as spam filtering software for Outlook. However, creating Office add-ins has traditionally been something of a chore because of the tedium associated with COM programming. Enter Office Add-In Express. Aimed at Delphi developers, this toolkit integrates into the Delphi IDE and makes it much easier to build robust add-ins that work with both Office 2003 applications and older versions of the software.

To show just what can be done, Add-in Express Team has made a number of sample 'ADX Toys' freely downloadable from their website. These include add-ins for Excel, Word and Outlook. As an example, once installed, the Outlook add-in gives you a new dockable toolbar from where you can invoke simple functions that display the full Internet headers in an email message, show 'raw' message content, invoke a modal 'About' box and so on. Source code for the samples is included, though not, naturally, for the underlying clever stuff - you have to pay for that!

What came as a pleasant surprise was the speed and personal attention that the Add-in Express support team gave to me when I had difficulty understanding how to implement one of the product's features. Not only were they spot on with respect to identifying the problem I had, but they got the answer to me in a matter of a few hours instead of days. Bravo!

We have been using the Add-In Express Ribbon Designer to enhance Locatech's SharePoint products, and we have been impressed by the ease of use, localization readiness and the great support whenever we had a question. Keep up the good work!

Here is my story, one of the last non trivial. I had to create a new extended, integrated and shared contact manager for Microsoft Outlook for a Company with 5 sub agencies in the world.

The add-in needed to get data from a remote UNIX server. The data was a list of contacts in a csv file. The server had to be accessed via ftp in a VPN. They also wanted the add-in to allow using generic search criteria, showing the results in a data grid, making direct calls, creating new e-mail messages for selected contacts. I needed to have the add-in settings on a custom tab in the Tools | Options menu.

With Add-in Express for .NET I created the add-in that did all this and much more. Add-in Express made things for me simpler because I didn?В?Р?йt have to worry about integration with windows, panels, tool strips, buttons, calling Outlook functions and other objects inside of MS Outlook as well as about hundreds of other issues. I could focus on the problem solving instead of creating the user interface of my add-in.

In the past I bought Add-in Express for Microsoft VSTO. Now I?В?Р?йm using Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and .net and Add-in Express for Internet Explorer and .NET.

Great tools and great support service whenever I needed information or was having some troubles.

Thank you,

Embarking on our first Office add-in it soon became apparent that Office Active-X development was convoluted and very time consuming. Add-in Express is a powerful suite of tools for the automatic creation of add-in for Microsoft Office products. The suite enabled us to quickly create complex add-ins within Outlook without worrying about any low level development or management of the add-in. I estimate this tool has saved us many weeks of coding.

Premium support from Add-in Express Team has been incredible, every problem we have had has been solved within a very short time-frame. New ideas and improvements have been considered and implemented quickly, it is great that they actually listen and respond to customers. This is how support should be!

I started two weeks ago on an existing project for a customer that was using Add-in-Express for Office. I have to say that it is a breeze to work with add-in-express. The manual is very good. When I run into problems, mostly it is covered there already.

So thanks for such a good product!

An opportune moment I think to say thanks to the people at add-in express for a superb support service. I have a number of third party components, but no other company offers such a high level of support as you guys do, I've had message sitting on some forums for weeks and still no reply.

If this is your idea of a standard support service then the mind boggles at what the Premium Support service might offer. Have you guys figured out a way to deliver coffee and donuts over the Internet? Never mind, I'm saving my pennies so I can see for myself.

I just have to say that the Premium Support Service Subscription is one of the best support functions I have ever come across. Your team do fantastic work, with both the product but also supporting it with samples.

Just thought you should know.

This morning, while talking with a prospect, they told me that a competing vendor told them they would add a feature that would let them import emails into their software in a fairly unique way. My response? Of COURSE we can do that too! What I didn't tell them was that I didn't know jack or squat about Outlook add-ins.

Enter Add-in Express. Less than four hours later, I had a fully integrated add-in which did exactly what the client wanted. Did I mention that I didn't require any support or assistance, and did everything based on the manual and demos from the website? No? Well, that's a pretty big deal for me. :-) So, if you need to integrate with Outlook, or with MS Office in general, check out this product. It's amazing.

Read the whole Google Groups thread.

I am really excited about Add In Express. And since I am over 50 years old it needs a lot to get me exited. All my problems to control my ribbon tab have gone immediately with the setup of Add-in Express. All ribbon elements can be controlled easily. Even as I could not find the register add-in command in the menu which I have seen in several YouTube videos a short look into the documentation helped in less than 5 minutes.

The Add-in Express documentation is so good that even helps me to cope with .NET since I come from VBA. And your support even before I have bought was great. Thank you very much.

We looked for an alternative framework to do Outlook development on and when we found Add-in Express there was no reason to look further. Our product, SafeSend - Check recipients in Outlook before sending, lets users confirm recipients and attachments in Outlook before they send external emails. We have many enterprise customers and our product needs to be 100% robust. This does not only include the part that interfaces with Outlook, but also the installation and registration of the add-in. We found that Add-in Express has met and even exceeded our high demands for an Outlook framework.

The Add-in Express solution not only includes an amazing product but also amazing support. As our customers have the highest demands on reliability, we have on several occasions used the excellent support provided by the Add-in Express team to either figure out how to configure something in detail, or simply to confirm that we are doing the exactly right thing. It can mean so much to hear from the actual developers what they would do in a certain edge case situation. Documentation alone can simply not cover all details.

I am writing to you as a very proud user of Add-In Express. We have just released Notes4Outlook, productivity add-in for Microsoft Outlook that allows attaching 'virtual sticky' notes to Outlook emails. It was a pleasure to work with Add-In Express. Your product is a must have for all add-in developers.

While we developed Outlook add-ins for the last 7 years, we never came across Add-In Express for some reason. Now looking back at those 7 years, I must say that it was just a pain doing all the work manually, with all the debugging related. With Add-In Express you just concentrate on important stuff and don't have to worry about things running under the hood since the people of Add-In Express are the experts who concentrate on that for you! Keep up the great work - we are looking forward to your 2010 release!

Our company has been bringing solutions for Microsoft Office to the market for a long time. And we have already used the Add-in Express components for a few years. We can say - we are very happy with them. The object model of the components is very clear, support is extraordinary perfect. We have saved a lot of our customers' time and money using Add-in Express products. Yes, there are some alternatives on the market, but Add-in Express products are proved and trusted. We are very glad to collaborate with this respected company and wonderful team.

Really simple, Add-in Express does most of the boring stuff for you. In under 30 minutes, I had my test application running without a problem and any complicated configurations to do. Very easy to integrate C# within existing VBA code, it will really cut my development time while combining the strengths of C# and Excel. Thanks so much!

We previously released our add-ins using Visual Basic 6. But Add-in Express made it easy for us to upgrade, and the result is a clearer interface that works across every version of Microsoft Word.