One VSTO Addin to Write to the Summary of any Office document?

Question

Using VSTO via VS2008 is it possible to write one office addin which will hook into the on Save event of any document type (Excel, Word, Powerpoint...) and write to say the summary property of the document?

Or does one have to write an addin for each office application?

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William Wegerson (www.OmegaCoder.Com)

Answer 1

I believe the latter is the answer. It's the Application object that has the Save method and each office application has it's own Application object. Also I'm not even sure what sort of setup/deployemnt implications there would be writing an add-in that targets installation into multiple office apps.

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Adam Tappis. (MCSD VB6 & .NET, MCDBA SQL 2000)

Answer 2

Hello OmegaMan,
 

Welcome to MSDN forums!

I totally agree with Adam Tappis, VSTO solution is application specific, we need to build different add-ins for different Office applications. If you need to build one add-in for all the Office applications, I suggest you could choose a Shard Add-In.

For the case that Shared Add-In is a better choice please refer to this link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2008/05/09/the-case-for-shared-add-ins.aspx


For the difference between this two type of add-ins you could refer to following threads:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/086b7b17-f4d2-4f84-aeb3-68e9ffdbf9a8
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/3f97705a-6052-4296-a10a-bfa3a39ab4e7

For you to get started with shared add-in below is a article on how to build a shared add-in for Access 2007 but the concept for any other Office application is the same.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa902693.aspx

If you have any futher question please feel free to follow up.

Thanks.

Tim Li

MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum

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Answer 3

Hello OmegaMan,
 

Welcome to MSDN forums!

Thanks Tim for your help and thanks for the welcome as well. ;-)

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William Wegerson (www.OmegaCoder.Com)