Channel 9

Word Add-ins Part 3: Searching for Text Strings and Adding Comments

Harry Miller — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:57:00 GMT

You can search the text in any open Microsoft Office Word document for specific strings if you put the code in a VSTO 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 with a comment that contains text passed in from a calling method.

Word Add-ins Part 2: When Add-ins Collide

Harry Miller — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:49:00 GMT

When you build a VSTO 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 on that computer. If you're not expecting the add-in to run, you might be surprized by what you see the next time you open the application or test a new project. This video shows how to easily uninstall add-ins from your development computer after you build them if you don't want them to run any more.

Word Add-ins Part 1: Clear the Ribbon Except for My Controls

Harry Miller — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:40:00 GMT

You can use VSTO to 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 location. Why? Well, really it's just to demo the Ribbon thing. But some day you might want to insert images into a document too, who knows?

Activating a Custom Tab on the Ribbon When a Document Is Opened

Harry Miller — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:34:00 GMT

A lot of people seem to want to make a certain tab or control on the Ribbon active programmatically using VSTO. It makes sense that a developer would want to select the custom tab if the controls that are most useful for the current document are all on that tab. This video goes in-depth about this programming question.

OK, not really. The video just says you can't do it, because the Ribbon is designed with the idea of leaving the user in control of the UI -- no surprise selection changes. But you should watch the video anyway. It's really short, and, you know, kinda funny.

Turn Off Automatic Conversion of Office 2003 Projects into 2007 Projects

Harry Miller — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:28:00 GMT

In Visual Studio 2008, when you open a Microsoft Office 2003 project, by default it starts the project migration wizard if you have the 2007 Microsoft Office system installed on your development computer. In other words, Visual Studio automatically tries to upgrade older VSTO projects to the version of Office that you have installed.

If you need to maintain the 2003 version of the project, you can turn off this default setting.

Create an Excel Shortcut Menu That Writes Selections to a Text File

Harry Miller — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:25:00 GMT

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 different from adding buttons to toolbars, but it really looks like that's what you're doing.

The code is all posted in this post on the VSTO team blog.

Thanks to McLean Schofield, programmer/writer and 3-star forum answer person, for this code example!