Office Development Video Series

In this practise, we have to choose four videos from this Microsoft development web and summarize them. All this videos are about devoloping for Office Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio.

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First video talks about how to do smart tags for Word. First, we need to create a new word add-in, and once our new project is open, we need to enable smart tags. Another previous pass is to import the Microsoft Smart Tags Library to our project. Then, we can create a new class for our custom smart tag (remember that we need to import libraries for smart tags and for Word tools).

When we are developing our smart tag, we can use the class Action for every smart tag action. These actions allows us to open a pop-up with a message, open a office document or our web browser, etc. Then, we can add the words that our smart tag refers to and develop the actions. After this, we have to develop the code that needs MS Word to found our smart tag when it is writed.

Then, we can perform with more details the context of the action of our smart tag. Finally, we can create the instance of our smart tag class in the add in main class, and then the new smart tag will be avaible on our MS Word.

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Second video talks about how to add a custom control to a sheet in MS Excel.

First of all, we have to create a new MS Excel addin, and add a new Ribbon tab. Then, we can add the controls we want to this ribbon tab. On each control event, we have to implement the code to detect sellected cells, and then the code needed to perform what we want on the selected cells. Remember that if we are using some control that works with boolean (yes or not) values (like a check box), we have to develop an action for both values.

If we don't want to get always our addin avaible, we can go to the main class of the addin and develop the required code to delete the addin when the sheet it is opened more of once, or make it avaible every time our sheet is opened.

Then, when we open our MS Excel sheet, our new control will be in the add-ins tab on the ribbon.

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Third video talks about how to develop an Office Solution using ClickOnce; for instance, from a MS Excel sheet.

For doing this, we need to run our MS Visual Studio as administrator, an open a new project as a MS Excel Workbook. When we hace our solution developed, we have to asign the .vsto extension to the "application" MIME type.

Then, we have to go to the properties tab of our project, the choose the publish tab and choose what prerequisites are needed to run our solution, and specify the period of time to check for updates. Now, we can choose the localization for publishing our solution and where is it going to be installed, using the publish wizard in the Build menu.

Once our application is published, if we make some changes to the source code, they will be updated to the publishing localization if the updates cheking was selected, and the aplication will be updated instantlly.

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Last video talks about how to connect a list in MS Excel to a SharePoint list.

First of all, we need to create a new Excel WorkBook in Visual Studio, and then we can add a neadd-in botton to the ribbon. This botton is going to call a public method to create the list from SharePoint.

Now, we can save the URL of our server and the List GUID in two strings; to get the URL of our server is easy, we just need to copy and paste it; to get the List GUID, we need to go to our list settings, and get the url from here; we just need the code generated before "List=%", and to replace the "%2D" characters by a "-".

Then, we can use the function "Add", but introducing the parameters as a "AddEx" function. We can write first "AddEx" for use the assistant to know what parameters introduce, and then, just delete "Ex". After this, we can run our sheet.

If we press the Add-.in button, we will get the SharePoint list, and if we modify it from MS Excel, we can update the changes by right click, select "Table", and then ""Synchronize with SharePoint". And of course, if we made some changes from SharePoint, we can update our list from Excel doing the same steps.

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