Office Add-ins developer platform community call – August 12, 2026

Office Add-ins developer platform community call – August 12, 2026

Office Add-ins developer platform community call - August 12, 2026

This month’s agenda and presenters

  • Add-in First-run Precheck tool – Ricky Kirkham, Principal Technical Writer. Ricky demonstrated the First-run Precheck tool, an AI prompt that inspects an Office Add-in package and reports whether its startup experience meets a key Microsoft Marketplace requirement. He also introduced a repository for AI prompts, skills, agents, and other tools for Office developers.
  • Unified manifest general availability – Emma Saboureau, Senior Product Manager. Emma announced that unified manifest support is generally available for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook add-ins, including Excel custom functions. She demonstrated how to convert an XML manifest to JSON, package and sideload the add-in, and prepare for migration while maintaining compatibility with clients that still require the XML manifest

View video segments

  • Introduction and agenda 00:04
  • Add-in First-run Precheck tool 01:00
  • Unified manifest general availability 20:41
  • Q&A 32:15

Resources related to this blog’s content

Q&A (question & answers)

Is there any plan to add a way to listen to slide changes in PowerPoint? We currently have to poll the current slide every few hundred milliseconds, that’s neither efficient nor convenient and is basically impossible to use for us because we have real-time websocket updates which create infinite loops on PowerPoint web, as the edited slide is still rendered in the background when starting a presentation.

At the moment, we don’t have plans to add a new API for listening to slide changes. We appreciate the feedback and will add it to our backlog. Additionally, please create a request for this feature on the Microsoft 365 Developer Platform Ideas Forum.

Documentation updates and highlights

CategoryArticleDescription
Copilot extensibilityCreate a Copilot skill for Excel that uses the Office JavaScript library (preview)Preview how to create a Copilot skill for Excel that uses the Office JavaScript library.
OutlookPreview encryption add-in improvementsPreview improvements for your encryption add-in.
GeneralRequest permissions for API use in add-insLearn about the different permission levels you can declare in your add-in to access the Office JavaScript APIs.

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