4 years ago we developed a PowerPoint add-in using the VSTO API. Since then we are waiting for the PowerPoint JavaScript API to support custom XML parts.
Word and Excel support this since the early days of their JavaScript APIs.
Is there an option to access custom XML data through the PowerPoint API?
We have searched the Microsoft documentation how to access XML parts with the PowerPoint API or through the more generic Office API, but without success.
Unfortunately, XML Parts are not supported in PowerPoint web add-ins. They are on the list of features we intend to support in the future, but I can't even estimate when that will happen. It will be many months at a minimum.
Related
I have an Office Word add-in that I wish to make it work with Office Word 2016 for Mac. I tried looking into official Microsoft documentation and could not find anything. I want to reuse as much code as possible while still having the extension to work with older versions of Word as well as Office Word 2016.
Is there any way to do this? Any help, even if it is something remotely related to this is appreciated.
TL;DR;
There is no way to do that.
Microsoft has bet on a new technology suite also called Office add-ins but web based. They are compatible with Mac. The old COM based approach (on which VSTO .NET add-in are built on) are legacy.
There is no way to reuse .NET code with this new technology, except of course to port business logic to the web server (which serves the web based add-in).
More reading on the comparison with the two add-ins generation: see this article I wrote
I second Benoit's answer. In addition, Not sure how complex is your add-in in terms of interactions with the document content, or if its a service that then inserts or imports data from a backend. Depending on that you will have more reusable code.
I would recommend you to do a full analysis on what APIs you need for your add-in to work properly. The new model offers big value with both supporting multiplatform and an easier deployment model. It also provides many rich APIs you can use, however the API depth its still not as rich as VSTO. Our goal is to get there.
I would be curious to understand if there are any gaps on you migration analysis.
thx!
I'm looking for an explanation as to what I can and can't do as well as advantages and disadvantages to using Visual Studio for coding instead of the built in text editor in Excel.
From my perspective
Use VBA editor (VBE) if you
develop ad-hoc apps for yourself, friends
are the only one who works on a project
mainly works with the Office object model - no communicating with System, Web, database etc.
don't use source control (Note: Rubberduck is here to help if you do so)
don't include too many dlls from the Reference form
don't want to learn new platform (.NET)
Note, I did all the above and I could live with just VBA for long time without too many problems and in a few ways VBA is much better than VSTO e.g. in debugging (here I mean, you can change almost everything when you are debugging VBA and you'll be still able to continue, there is no way to do the same in VSTO)
Use VSTO if you
want to better support for System, Web, XML, database tasks. NET is
much more better especially if we're talking about web or database
stuff
want to have better support (sometime out of box) for version control
(GIT, SVN, TFS, Perforce)
don't won't to have problems with dependencies (this could be
actually painful as well)
want to use new VSTO objects like NamedRange incl. events
want to learn new platform
I remember myself a few years ago when I thought VSTO brigs something new to Office object model, and it doesn't if you don't count the VSTO objects. So if you're heavily working with just Excel object model (manipulating with ranges, sheets, workbooks, calculating) you can still live with VBA only.
I also remember that with VSTO you can't easily create UDF (custom function)
Also seems like that MS is not going to invest too much effort to add/update/improve VSTO, they rather focus on Office API
VSTO blog - comments
Thanks for your question Ben, we have already publically announced that we will not be turning off VSTO or VBA in the next version of Office. All of our new investments are in Apps for Office and Apps for SharePoint and making the Office 365 APIs more robust. We will not be making any future investments in VSTO or VBA
It might look like I'm against VSTO but I'm not, I've been using it for more than 4 years daily and returning back to VBA just for quick testing or quick projects.
Hope this helps
From developing language, Excel Editor is VBA, and VS is C#/VB.NET. If you have a light function, you could use VBA directly, if you have a large requirement, .NET/VSTO would be suitable, it would be convenient to manage your code in VS, .NET.VSTO is managed code, it’s performance is better than VBA. With VSTO, you could custom Office UI. From distributing your project, you need to copy the office file with macro enabled. You could use ClickOnce or Windows installer to distribute .net/VSTO solution.
Is there anything like Google Slides, which can be integrated into the app we are building?
If not, then atleast a way to programmatically import the ppt file, and navigate to the editor for editing?
Any suggestions will be appreciated...
There's an official powerpoint online editor now. You could theoretically put an iframe linking to this page. It seems to require a 365 or Microsoft account, though.
I had a similar requirement and have tested both the online offerings of Microsoft Office (SharePoint, One Drive) and Google docs. However, I finally decided on Only Office (https://www.onlyoffice.com/). The reasons for this were:
The Google and Microsoft offerings didn't (AFAIAK) have the fine tuned security I needed for document editing and access via their various API (i.e. I needed to be able to prevent downloads of documents but allow editing)
Google and Microsoft require sign-in from their respective platforms to use these. This was a UX problem for my project.
Depending on the specific requirement Only Office has the Document Server on a GNU APGL v3 licence. You may need to buy a licence but worth a check.
Their repo is here:
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/
I need to add/edit/del events to a shared Google cal using visual basic or Access (not using VB.NET) to post events from a custom desktop calendar built in Access and some VB. My goal - users can have an internal office calendar used for years and fully integrated with office functions, while choosing to share some of these events on a Web calendar for scheduling.
I can find others not using VB.NET who want to do the same, but none of their posts have been successful in finding out how.
If I cannot use the google API with VB (not vb.net) can I use vbscript to add/del calendar events? I found some sample code that was successful for adding an event with vbscript, but no successful code in vbscript to del or edit (tho others have tried).
Appreciate any help/suggestions on this. After hours across 2 days searching, this group looks like my final hope.
Thanks,
Mark
As part of an investigation into enterprise level server side document generation I have come across Open XML.
For those that have used this, how successful were you? Would you recommend it?
Can you save the OpenXML to PDF directly or would I need to make use of a 3rd party component?
If a 3rd Party component is required, which one did you use and which one would you recommend?
Thanks
Gineer
The nice thing about the Office OpenXML is that it's the language of Microsoft Office -- if you live your "office life" in Word and Excel (2007 and later), that's the format you want.
Can you "save" OpenXML directly to PDF? No, it needs to be rendered by some third-party component.
If you're doing document generation on the server side and you don't need to be working with Office documents as output, you'd generally use something like iText or iTextSharp, which would render the PDFs directly.
I haven't worked with a server-side component that will do the translation from Office OpenXML to PDF, though.
There are various third party components for the OpenXML to PDF piece. I maintain the open source docx4j, which is one option.
If you are doing document generation, you may find you need repeats and conditionals. For suggestions on how to do this, see http://dev.plutext.org/svn/docx4j/trunk/docx4j/sample-docs/databinding/conventions.html
Call me biased, as I worked on this component, but the PDF Conversion Services are used by many small and large organisations to convert OpenXML as well as many other formats to PDF using a friendly Web Services interface.
Check out these examples:
C# / .NET
Java