Office Add-in Development Community (PnP) -- July 2021 update

The Office Add-ins developer platform team has new updates to share this month on Office Add-ins Patterns and Practices. PnP is a community effort, so if you’re interested in contributing, see our good first issue list.

Use Outlook event-based activation to tag external recipients (preview)

[Diagram showing new email with added external recipient. OnMessageRecipientsChange event is sent to Outlook add-in. Add-in prepends the text external to the subject line] “Diagram showing new email with added external recipient. OnMessageRecipientsChange event is sent to Outlook add-in. Add-in prepends the text external to the subject line”

This sample uses event-based activation to run an Outlook add-in when the user creates a new message or appointment. The add-in can respond to events, even when the task pane is not open. It registers for the OnMessageRecipientsChanged event. If the message has external recipients, the add-in prepends “[External]” to the message subject. When the user sends an email message that includes external recipients, the add-in appends a disclaimer to the message.

• Check out the code sample: Use Outlook event-based activation to tag external recipients (preview)
• Check out the docs: Configure your Outlook add-in for event-based activation (preview)

Insert an external Excel file and populate it with JSON data

This sample shows how to insert an existing template from an external Excel file into the currently open Excel file. Then it retrieves data from a JSON web service and populates the template for the customer.

• Check out the code sample: Insert an external Excel file and populate it with JSON data
• Check out the docs: insertWorksheetsFromBase64 method

SSO samples updated

We moved the SSO samples to the PnP repo. We also updated them to the latest packages and libraries. You can find them here:

• Single Sign-on (SSO) sample Outlook add-in
• Office Add-in that supports Single Sign-on (SSO) using Node.js
• Office Add-in that supports Single Sign-on (SSO) using ASP.NET

Want to contribute?

PnP is a community effort by developers like you. Check out our good first issue list as a great place to help with some samples. Feel free to contribute to existing samples or create new ones.

About Office Add-ins Patterns & Practices (PnP)

Office Add-ins PnP is a Microsoft-led, community driven effort that helps developers extend, build, and provision customizations on the Office platform the right way by providing guidance and help through official documentation and open-source initiatives. The source is maintained in GitHub where anyone can participate and provide contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation. Office Add-ins PnP is owned and coordinated by Office engineering teams, but the work is done by the community for the community. Find code samples for Office Add-in development in the Office Add-ins PnP repo. Some samples are also documented in the Office Add-ins docs, such as Open in Excel.

Additional resources

• Get started with Office development by joining the Microsoft 365 developer program.
• Try out some samples and get coding quickly with Office add-ins by downloading Script Lab.
• Automate your solutions with Office Scripts.

Learn more by joining the monthly Office Add-ins community call.