Finally I received an e-mail that told me that Office Live Workspace is available!
“Office Live Workspace is your online place to store, access, and share 1000+ documents. Use it to distribute meeting notes, work together on group assignments, or simply store documents that you can access from any computer.”
Take a look at http://workspace.office.live.com. A soon as I try it I’ll write a little bit about it.
You can add sample text to a Microsoft Word document by typing =rand(A,B) followed by the enter key.
A represents the number of paragraphs, and B the number of sentences for each paragraph.
Applies to several versions of Microsoft Word.
About a week ago I wrote a Power Point add-in which uses my XBox360GamePad Component to enable users to control a slide show with the XBox controller. Well, it’s kind of geek and maybe useless add-in, but it was a compelling objective who drove me to try MS Office development for the first time. It’s a shame that I don’t have a wireless controller… You can download this Add-in and have fun diving into the project code or just try it in a final user perspective by installing it in your Power Point 2007. I must warn you again that it will only work if you have XNA Game Studio 2.0 installed. I’m still trying to find out how to distribute this applications without this huge requirement.
Now I’ll leave here some tips/guidelines on MS Office development. I hope it will be useful if you want to start developing in this widely used software piece.
1. If you are working with Visual Studio 2005 you must install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System. It also provides the prerequisites to develop for MS Office 2003. If you are working with Visual Studio 2008. These tools ship with the product.
2. Create a new project in Visual Studio. You can choose from a bunch of project templates by choosing the Office targeted version (2003 or 2007) and the application to which you’ll develop the add-in.
3. After you create an add-in project a file named ThisAddIn.cs will appear in the Solution Explorer. It has two event handlers: OnStartup and OnShutdown. I think that those names are self-explanatory. They are triggered on startup and shutdown of the add-in. There are 2 objects that you must know about to be able to interact with the Office application instance where the add-in is running. They are Globals.ThisAddIn and Globals.Ribbons. You can use the first one to access the context where the add-in is running and the document that is opened. The second one is used in MS Office 2007 development and allows you to manipulate the Ribbon.
Here I leave some properties, methods and events available in Globals.ThisAddin (note that inside the ThisAddIn.cs this object is equivalent to this keyword. If you have some more files that global object can be useful). These examples were extracted from a Power Point add-in.
Just have fun exploring the API and I am sure you’ll find something useful to you. You can fill your plugin as you wish. You can add some windows forms triggered by some event or bind document contents to a database.
4. You can use Visual Studio to design Ribbon tabs or even add buttons to the MS Office applications main menu. Add a new item to your project and choose “Ribbon (Visual Designer)”.
5. When you run this project in Visual Studio it starts a MS Office application instance allowing to debug your add-in.
6. Take a look at this entry in João Lívio (MVP) blog which links to some nice videos about MS Office development.
Lembram-se da conta do Hotmail configurada no Outlook que demorava “horas” a abrir?
Esqueçam!
Instalem o MS Office Outlook Connector que permite configurar contas com .Net Passport / Live ID no Outlook com performance melhorada (os mails ficam localmente) e com a hipótese de aplicar regras sobre os e-mails recebidos.
