I am looking for the way to implement MS Word plug-in for Mac and Windows. The plug-in should work with all versions of Microsoft Office (Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Office 2013, Microsoft Office 2016) and should work on Windows XP - Windows 10. It should work on MS Word on Mac also (at least on the latest versions).
It seems to be impossible to create one app for all of this OS and versions.
Description of the plug-in: The plug-in should help user to find the definition of any word (the definition will be in the beginning of this file or in the other file on the user's local disk). For example, user place mouse over word "math", a plug-in shows pop-up with definition "Mathematics (from Greek μάθημα máthēma, “knowledge, study, learning”) is the study of topics such as quantity (numbers), structure, space and change".
I am thinking about some variants of implementation.
First variant. I can make plug-in with help of WinForms and Microsoft.Office.Interopt for all Windows OS and versions of MS Office. I can create add-ins for Word on Mac with help of JavaScript. (Add-ins on JavaScript don't work on Microsoft Office versions < 2013).
Second variant. I can create plug-in with help of VBA for both platform and for all versions.
Are these variants possible? What the best way to create plug-in for Windows and Mac?
First variant. I can make plug-in with help of WinForms and Microsoft.Office ...
This, sound to me, way you should go if you would like to support older Office products (2010 and older). You would create VBA or COM/VSTO version for older versions on Windows. For older versions of Mac (ex:Entourage) you should consider AppleScript scripting extendability. Office Add-in (JS API) for newer versions on Windows and Mac together.
Second variant. I can create plug-in with help of VBA for both platform and for all versions.
No such thing as VBA add-on for Mac. You may efficiently use AppleScript for scripting certain actions in older Office for Mac.
This is all about your requirements. At the end you will make your decision. I would go with Office JS API as the start and later on see if you have strong demand of your app for older versions of Office.
Yes it is possible, but refine your requirement.
Go for Apps for Office (Windows + Mac) and not Com Add-ins (Only in Windows).
Related
In windows, ms-office has the functionality of Installed Addins, wherein people can extend functionality of office. is there any such framwork for addins in Mac?
I have searched at many places, and ans i have found is no. the only way is by injection and swizzling. but I want some stable way to do it. I want to use office API's.
You can use office addins
https://dev.office.com/docs/add-ins/overview/office-add-ins
This will work on Mac also
The best way to achieve this to use Office Web-Addins for development. This works for all the scenarios: Office Web, iOS, Android, Windows and Mac as you can install it from the Microsoft Store.
If I build a PowerPoint VBA-Add-in under Office for Windows, will the created .ppam file work under Office for Mac?
I wouldn't count on it.
What will/won't work will depend to some extent on the Mac Office version.
In 2008, nothing will work. There's no VBA there.
in 2011, some stuff will break, and you'll have to write commandbar code for the UI, because it doesn't accept RibbonX.
In 2016, you get RibbonX more or less working, but the app is sandboxed ... you'll be severely restricted in where you can read/write files.
And of course, if you use any Win API calls, they won't work on Mac.
I have a few add-ins for Excel and Word 2007-2016. And I don't understand a few things. My project use some dlls, like Microsoft.Office.Tools.Common, Office.dll, some excel, word and common interop's. And these files can be found in a few places at the same time, different versions of them (like program files, windows/assembly, windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly). So I don't know which version to use. And also, if user has VSTO installed, I suppose he has these files. So why do I need to provide them? What do we install exactly when we install VSTO? Which part is for what and which installation place is from which component? I think I don't do it right, because I found out that Excel loads two different versions of the same file at the same time.
Those are a lot of questions, and many of them depend very much on exactly what you provide with your solution...
The case of the PIAs ("Office dlls") is relatively clear cut:
You do NOT need to (and should not) distribute the Office PIAs with a VSTO solution, with the possible exceptions of 2007 and 2010. In these versions, installing .NET support was optional and not default. That's why there are redistributables for these versions, and not for others. Your installer needs to check whether they're present (same as with the VSTO runtime and the version of the .NET Framework) and install only when necessary.
Office always installs the PIAs into the GAC and your solution will find them there. It makes no difference where you referenced them on your developer machine.
The PIAs in the GAC are only available via the COM tab in the Visual Studio dialog box for inserting references. Many .NET developers didn't find them there, so Microsoft delivers a (ONE) single set of PIAs with VSTO and copies them to a Visual Studio folder so that they'll show up in the .NET tab of the dialog box. The only problem with this is that you get only the set of PIAs for the version of Office that was "current" when that version of Visual Studio was released, meaning you may get the impression you can't develop against any other version because you don't find the PIAs in the .NET tab (but they will be in the COM tab).
Rule of thumb: Always, always develop your code using the earliest version of Office you plan to support. There are two reasons for this: 1) You can only use functionality that will be available to all versions of the Office application (Office is generally backwards compatible); 2) Office is designed to migrate references to older sets of PIAs to newer sets, but not the other way around.
There's a good article on deployment pinned at the top of the VSTO forum on MSDN that "sorts" a lot of requirements for various versions of VSTO and Office: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/1666d2b0-a4d0-41e8-ad86-5eab3542de1e/deploying-office-solutions-to-end-user-computers?forum=vsto for add-ins targeting 2007-2010. For later versions, see the MSDN documentation: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386179.aspx
we have a mixed environment. Some workstations have Microsoft Office 2010 installed while others have Microsoft Office 2007 installed. A lot of our in-house developed applications are referring to the Outlook 12.0 object library and the Excel 12.0 object library. In Office 2010 these are referring to the 14.0 object libraries. Is there a way when users launch an Access application that it checks which version of Office they have installed and when it detects either Office 2007 or Office 2010 so that it can programatically set the correct references to the Object Libraries?? Many thanks for any help and/or suggestions.
Set the references to use the earliest version of the reference and Ms Access will automatically upgrade the reference for later versions of Access if needed.
For example, if none of your workstations use anything less than Access 2007, you should set the reference to Excel 12.0. Any workstation using Access 2010 or 2013 will update the reference automatically for their local copy
I've had similar conflict issues between office 2010,2013 and 2016.
I think the whole point of initiating this thread is that "should" <> "does"...
Meaning that programing to the earlier version does not "always" work when the user PC is not running the exact same version of MS Office that was used during development.
I think maybe need to somehow add both object references to the compiled version and then the app can pick.
In other words, I think the development PC needs to be running both versions of Outlook.
You could also alternatively develop the app on a PC running the earlier version and then save off a copy to be compiled in a newer version of office on a different PC. You'd be basically generating versions specifically for each version of Office.
I am struggling to apply an existing 32bit COM addin to 64bit Microsoft Word 2010.
To make the addin visible to Word, I have used the dllsurrogate-method, as it described here.
The problem is that now addin caused some strange exception when tries to add its toolbar and menu to office's. I cannot figure out, what it is, it seems, that the command bar reference became not valid in unpredicable moments.
Can anyone explain this?
Note, that everething is fine when I use the same addin under 32bit Microsoft Word 2010 and more old versions of Ms Office.
32-bit add-ins are not supported on 64-bit. Microsoft recommends to use the 32-bit version of Office unless you run into the memory limitations of a 32-bit process which is only likely to happen if you need to deal with extremely large spreadsheets:
The recommendations for which edition of Office 2010 to install are as follows:
If users in your organization depend on existing extensions to Office, such as ActiveX controls, third-party add-ins, in-house solutions built on previous versions of Office, or 32-bit versions of programs that interface directly with Office, we recommend that you install 32-bit Office 2010 (the default installation) on computers that are running both 32-bit and 64-bit supported Windows operating systems.
If some users in your organization are Excel expert users who work with Excel spreadsheets that are larger than 2 gigabytes (GB), they can install the 64-bit edition of Office 2010. In addition, if you have in-house solution developers, we recommend that those developers have access to the 64-bit edition of Office 2010 so that they can test and update your in-house solutions on the 64-bit edition of Office 2010.
If you need to go with the 64-bit version because of the memory limitations you have the following options:
If you have the source code, you can generate a 64-bit version yourself,
You can contact the vendor for an updated version,
You can search for an alternative solution.