A general Addin for office solution

Question

Is there a possibility of having a general addin for Microsoft office and the same addin is visible in all Office solutions such as EXCEL, WORD, POWERPOINT etc. We can create individual addins for these applications separately but having a common solution would serve my purpose e.g. if I need to tag some information to all of my documents to be printed.

Any sort of information is highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Is there a possibility of having a general addin for Microsoft office and the same addin is visible in all Office solutions such as EXCEL, WORD, POWERPOINT etc.

Yes

There are two types of Add-In

• VSTO Add-Ins (I will use VAI for short in describing them below)
• Shared Add-Ins (I will use SAI for short in describing them below)

VAI are application-specific viz, MS Excel, MS Word etc. On the other hand SAI can be written for more than one application i.e can be shared between MS Excel, MS Word etc. Also I am sure that you are aware that VAI has only two main methods. One for startup and the other for shutdown. However SAI has to implement different methods for connection, unconnecting, startup and shutdown.

Another thing that is important to note is that since VAI is application specific there is not too much of code involved as compared to SAI. The reason being SAI work across different applications and hence you need to extra code to distinguish which application is currently calling your Add-in.

I prefer VAI because it lets me use additional programming "shortcuts" and useful objects not available in a Shared Add-in. Not that these are cannot be used in SAI but then you will have to specifically create them. An unnecessary added work if I may say so.

And the last that I can think of is the deployment. They both have a different deployment method.

Hope this clears the concept of a VAI and SAI