Office Add-ins developer platform community call – January 11, 2023

Office Add-ins developer platform community call – January 11, 2023

Office Add-ins developer platform community call - January 11, 2023

This month’s agenda and presenters

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

  • Deploy Office Add-in that uses SSO to Azure App Service. David Chesnut, Senior Technical Writer, Microsoft.
  • Feedback for WXP (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) add-ins. Yun Wang, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft.
  • Outlook add-in preview API - prependOnSendAsync. Yashvardan Joshi, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft.
  • Q&A. See question and answers at end of call and in chat throughout call. Preethika Kiruveedula, Product Manager, Microsoft.

View video segments

  • Introduction 00:00
  • Deploy Office Add-in that uses SSO to Azure App Service 00:40
  • Feedback for WXP (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) add-ins 17:35
  • Outlook add-in preview API - prependOnSendAsync 20:10
  • Q&A 26:38
  • Resources 29:38
  • Closing 30:24

Topic summaries

  • Deploy Office Add-in that uses SSO to Azure App Service. Follow the steps outlined in a recent article to create and deploy a single sign-on (SSO) Office Add-in to Microsoft Azure App Service. Create project, configure it to run SSO, app registration, install an Azure Extension in VS Code, create a new app service, update the manifest and package JSON, deploy the web app, create a new workbook in Excel, and test your new add-in.
  • Feedback for WXP (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) add-ins. Help us prioritize our work to make Office Add-ins better. Tell us about your user scenarios of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint add-ins. Review existing extensibility surveys on Auto install and auto launch add-ins for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (to be done in a future call) and on Structured document content usage in Word add-ins.
  • Outlook add-in preview API - prependOnSendAsync. What is the Prepend on-Send API? Use cases (legal statements, images), API details (prepend text in html and plain text emails and in event invites), API parameters, manifest changes (permissions), demo (show photo inserted above text in sent mail, and in meeting invite) and documentation. In Preview for Win32 presently and coming soon for MAC and Outlook for Web.

Call to action

Q&A (Question & Answers)

Outlook Mobile (on iOS and Android) still only generally supports message read mode. When is compose mode and the on-send event going to be supported? This feature difference between the Outlook variants has been present for many years and remains a major barrier to customer adoption of our Outlook add-in. It is an open issue in GitHub.

We currently do not have a roadmap for this feature. This feature request has been submitted to aka.ms/m365dev-suggestions. Please go there to upvote and provide more details about your add-in and your exact requirements for compose on Mobile.

We would like to enter our Outlook add-in into AppSource, but it is blocked because it is an on-send add-in. When will AppSource accept on-send add-ins? What is the roadmap regarding adding on-send functionality to phones (both iPhone and Android)?

This is still not allowed. We recently shipped Smart alerts which has relatively the same functionality and is allowed in the store. For more information see Smart Alerts Walkthrough. Please note that SendMode=Block is still not allowed in the store.

What is the timeline for upcoming features in PowerPoint? There’s a lot in Excel but can’t be done in Word or PowerPoint. The developer feedback and ideas forum doesn’t get much attention. Could there be more effort in this review?

Thank you for that feedback. There are currently a number of features currently being worked on in PowerPoint, if you have an feature requests you would like to see soon please fill out this survey

Is there a timeline for when Outlook Mobile (on iOS and Android) will support compose mode for Office add-ins, and further when the on-send event will be supported? Currently only read-mode is supported for Outlook add-ins and this has been the state for many years now, but our add-in is essentially for compliance measures to ensure all sent messages include some extra input/metadata from the sender.

We have been getting questions on on-send support for mobile quite frequently now. This feature will be looked into once we are able to finish delivering other features that on-send would build upon. 

We just saw that PowerPoint desktop client now supports PowerPoint API1.5 with the semi-annual channel. We tried the PowerPoint web client and it still does not. Will that be rolling out soon to keep up with desktop client?

PowerPoint 1.5 support for PowerPoint Online web app is being rolled out, you should see it being available soon. The functionality should also work even if the supported requirement still returns 1.4 at this time.

I am in need of information on how to list our Outlook add-in as an MSI, inside Microsoft AppSource to run in the Outlook desktop app. The Microsoft support people referred us here. Could someone please take our case and help us? Maybe an email address to contact me?

AppSource only supports web add-ins and not COM add-ins. To distribute COM add-ins, use Azure Marketplace or any third-party digital delivery system or e-commerce solution. For guidance with publishing to Azure Marketplace, see What is the Microsoft commercial marketplace?.

We tried the setSelectedShapes() example in Script Lab and it did select the first two shapes as advertised. But when we modified the example to pass in an empty array, it did not unselect the shapes as the doc indicates it should (and how it works on desktop).

This is a known bug. You can see the issue on GitHub and track the issue there. Please provide more info if necessary.

Does deployment of an SSO add-in work with PowerShell? When we try it through PowerShell, it fails and gives an error message. We tried it through the Exchange admin center, not from the Azure CLI.

Deployment of an SSO add-in may not work with PowerShell under certain conditions.The add-in may require admin consent, which means a UI needs to pop up from Microsoft identity platform to do the consent. Looks like this isn’t possible in PowerShell according to this post: How to grant admin consent to an Azure AAD app in Powershell?, but there is a workaround shown to use the Azure CLI.

Is anyone aware of the Excel Range Top and Left attribute errors? So that we could help you further, please open an issue on GitHub.

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