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Office Add-ins developer platform community call – Ocotober 12, 2022

Office Add-ins developer platform community call - Ocotober 12, 2022

This month’s agenda and presenters

The call was hosted by Preethika Kiruveedula, Product Manager, Microsoft

  • Update the ASP.NET server in Visual Studio. David Chesnut, Senior Technical Writer, Microsoft.
  • Feedback request for Excel Add-in Auto install launch function. Yawei Zhu, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft.
  • Community spotlight. Recognizing Eric Legault, Senior Principal Software Architect, Eric Legault Consulting.
  • Q&A. See question and answers at end of call and in chat throughout call. Preethika Kiruveedula, Product Manager, Microsoft.

View video segments

Topic summaries

  • Update the ASP.NET server in Visual Studio. Learn how to update a task pane in an Excel Add-in to use a new ASP.NET Core project. When you create a new project in Visual Studio and choose the Excel Web Add-in, actually two projects are created – a web ASP.NET server and a sideloader. Configure the solution to add a new ASP.NET Core project, update the sideload project to point to it, and update your manifest. Add additional capabilities to the index page in the new project.
  • Feedback request for Excel add-in auto install launch function. What if your office JS add-in can be discovered and safely auto installed and auto launched! Use scenario — one receives a file with elements created by an add-in used by the sender. We would greatly appreciate it if you would provide feedback about this proposed capability by selecting the survey link and answering three brief questions. Use it? Why? For what scenarios?

Call to action

Q&A (Question & Answers)

Regarding the need to register functions called by add-in manifest ExecuteFunction using Office.actions.associate, if we’re using an older copy of the office-js library will the requirement for the function to have been registered still apply? e.g. there was a bug introduced in office.js back in 2020 so we stuck to a version of the library from before that change, will such an add-in be impacted by the need to register functions?

Yes, this requirement will still apply on October 30th. Full details are in the blog post Announcing changes to Office Add-ins’ ExecuteFunction commands Using an older Office.js library will probably work because the associate command has been around a long time, but we’re not 100% sure here. Can you please post this question to https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js/issues where we can follow up? Especially let us know what bug is blocking you from using the latest office.js library. We’d prefer everyone can use the latest version! Thanks!

Hi. Thanks for a good community! I especially enjoyed the April session where Onur Onder made a really good demonstration on some beta PowerPoint APIs and some nice features he developed in ScriptLab. I was just curious if these snippets were shared in a public gist to allow for a closer look. Would be really appreciated if that was the case. If I could make a wish for future content, I’m really curious to get some high-level pointers on how to develop a custom chart object. I’m inspired by ThinkCell (this is not Office.js as far as I understand) and MekkoChart (www.mekkographics.com) that have some nice chart elements and a few steps down the road I would like to make my own charts… Would be really good to go about it in the best way with some guidance from the real experts Thanks again!

Update (December 5, 2022): These were added to Script Lab. Open Script Lab in PowerPoint, then go to Samples. The new PowerPoint API samples are located in the Shapes, Slide Management, and Text sections.

When will Microsoft Word Forms API’s will be added in office JS?

We currently do not have plans to add Microsoft Word Forms apis to Office JS. Currently the best way to do this would be to use the Forms connector in Power Automate.

Hi! Is it possible to write Outlook add-in that will work with Gmail account to set email signature in Outlook using event-based activation as described in https://learn.microsoft.com/samples/officedev/pnp-officeaddins/outlook-add-in-set-signature/?

This is a good question to ask here https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js.

Would you say what you just demonstrated with Visual Studio is the preferred approach for developing a web add-in vs. the Yeoman and Visual Studio Code approach?

Either one works. If your background is in VSTO you may find that using the Visual Studio IDE a more familiar environment. But you probably also want to use a newer version of ASP.NET, which the demonstration shows. You may also be interested in the Blazor Webassembly samples which allow you to keep your task pane UI in C# as well.

What is the Mac equivalent of the Wef folder to clear the cache?

For instructions on how to clear the Office cache on Mac, see the “Clear the Office cache on Mac” section in Clear the Office cache.

I was just wondering if any of you are developing add-in for the IPAD since I am just experiencing an issue with the event handler on data changed in a worksheet. With the new Excel IPAD version (2.65.1) it seems that the event handler is not called any more while it was working with the previous versions. On Windows, Excel on the Web everything is working fine except with this new IPAD version and the issue is also that I can’t revert back to a previous IPAD version :( Thanks in advance for any feedback or suggestion in reporting this issue to Microsoft!

We’re sorry to hear you’re experiencing an issue with developing an add-in on an iPad. If you haven’t already, please submit a GitHub issue on office-js, so that we can escalate it to the Excel team for further investigation.

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