From the course: Microsoft Office Add-Ins for Developers

What are Office add-ins?

From the course: Microsoft Office Add-Ins for Developers

Start my 1-month free trial

What are Office add-ins?

“

- [Narrator] So what are Office Add-Ins? Add-Ins are custom extensions to Microsoft products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. These extensions might consist of extra buttons in the ribbon, a side panel, or perhaps something embedded in the content of the document. Or, even some combination of these. Maybe this is completely new to you, or maybe you extended Office using one of several different development models that have appeared over the years. So just to be completely clear, we're talking, in this course, about Office Web Add-Ins, as distinct from earlier technologies that use tools like VSTO, that's Visual Studio Tools for Office, which are sometimes also called Add-Ins. I'll explain the differences in another video. Let's see an example of an Office Add-In. I'm going to open PowerPoint with a blank presentation. If I select the Insert tab, and choose Add-Ins, I can go to the store, and I can see there are many Add-Ins available to me. Let's pick one of these. I'm going to take this template chooser, click through the consent dialogue, and now I can see it in the ribbon. If I click on the button, the task pane comes up and I can start using it to improve my presentations. The Add-In extends the functionality of PowerPoint, but to the user, it just feels like part of it, and they don't have to start another application or switch context. This makes Add-Ins ideal for situations where users are doing repetitive tasks involving business documents. I find this often happens, where a manual business process that once worked well, doesn't really scale as the business grows, resulting in frustrated users. These are often a good opportunity to be the developer hero, who comes up with an efficient solution based on Add-Ins. If it's really good, it can even be turned into a general purpose Add-In, that can be sold commercially through the Office store. It's really all about getting maximum business value with minimum development effort, and because Add-Ins are so easy to build and use, you can really deliver a lot, and that's what I'm going to try to show you in this course.

Contents