What is a standard set of office tools that nearly all of us have used at some point? Before you start scratching your head and trying to find answers. It’s the ever-so-helpful Microsoft Office Suite. We all know about macros in Microsoft Excel. You may have used them to update tables programmatically, do calculations, and generate fancy charts and reports. How many of you know about Office Add-Ins?
Add-Ins can be used to create web solutions in any Office Application. They are also available via Menus. This is a quick overview of Office Add-Ins.
Office Add-Ins can accomplish almost everything a web page can do in a browser. You can do nearly anything with Add-Ins
- Office clients get new functionality
- You can create interactive objects that you can embed in Office documents
More.
Boomerang is a prime example of Microsoft Add-Ins. Boomerang is an add-in to Microsoft Outlook. You can schedule an email to be sent later, pause your inbox to concentrate on work or set up a reminder for any emails sent. Boomerang is a great tool to improve your productivity in your work life.
Another example is XLTools.net Data Cleaning. This add-in is for Microsoft Excel. It helps clean up messy Excel sheets. Nitor Infotech”>data organized in a standard format that is easy to consume and manage.
These are the only two examples I can think of. There are many add-ins available if you dig deeper.
You will discover that Microsoft add-ins allow you to do a lot more.
- Nitor Infotech”>AI/ML operations in Excel Add-In for data analysts and scientists
- Data analytics available for engineering teams
- Asset management for heavy industries
- Find media assets
- Check out the metadata for products and assets
- Open default Smart documents for every purchase and product
Let me now give you a brief overview of Add-Ins and what I’ve learned through my experiences using them. Proper deployment is one of the biggest problems in Office Add-Ins. Nitor Infotech”>UI/UX publishing is present. However, the steps or checklists for deployment should be mentioned. It will not load if you deploy the solution as a web app with default configuration server configuration.
These points can help make your job easier and save you time doing frantic research.
You might be wondering why I jumped straight to the deployment stage. This is because most of the work involved in development is very similar to Web Application Development.
But, deployment is different from web application deployment. There needs to be a more straightforward guide. This blog can help you.
To understand the topology behind Office Add-Ins, look at this block diagram by Microsoft.
This diagram shows two components, apart from the Office application.
- Manifest
- Our website
You can see that there is no a browser in this area. Office Add-In is the container for our application. It doesn’t allow you to enter URLs or offer a link to a web page. We need to know where we can start.
In the manifest file, the start web page is listed. There may be multiple entry points for an application. All entry points are included in the CTA button that appears in the menu. It is also mapped to the website in the manifest file.
Navigation to other pages is only possible through the internal actions of those pages.
We have a lot of learnings from the initial encounter with Office Add-In. These are just a few:
Generating an environment-specific manifest file
We prefer to have multiple webpack files with yeoman generators. Every web pack is different depending on its environment. E.g., Title, ManifestID, URLs, etc. Then, we can map npm commands to create a build using webpack
Server Configuration
To ensure that the Office Add-In runs smoothly, the office.js file is referenced in index.html’s script tag. Office.js is available on Microsoft CDN and has all the functionality required for Office Add-Ins. There are also additional javascript and CSS files that Office.js references internally. These files are blocked by default on all application servers, such as Apache Tomcat, Nginx, and Nginx. This is due to the CORS policy. The Content-Security Policy must be regularly updated to allow Microsoft CDNs to access other locations. Here are some examples:
Office Online Support
This server configuration is sufficient to allow Add-Ins to work on the Desktop version. If we need it to work on Office Online, however, additional domains must be allowed.
I want to end by saying that Office Add-Ins can be used in many ways. They can enhance your operations, administration, analysts, and scientists’ capabilities. This expertise has been applied to multiple domains to assist our clients in achieving their business goals. While development is one area where there will be a lot of assistance, deployment is another. Each organization is unique, and each product will require a different approach.
Contact Nitor Infotech for more information about our Microsoft Add-Ins services and the solutions we have implemented to assist our clients in achieving their business goals.
