

How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013 - bhanks
https://www.lucidchart.com/techblog/2013/03/22/how-to-write-an-app-for-microsoft-office-2013/

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lallysingh
If you're going to put up source (or in this case, XML), may I suggest two
things?

(1) Please indent.

(2) Consider syntax highlighting.
<http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/> will do it for you.

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bhanks
Thanks for the tips. Wordpress was being extremely uncooperative. Wasn't
parsing <pre> or <code> properly. I will throw that .js script up on the next
release. Thanks!

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andzt
Have you found any significant increase in users from the "discoverability by
being in the Microsoft App Store"? Also, any reason you didn't implement this
as a classic COM plugin?

We wrote similar apps for Outlook 2013, but didn't see much traction. Also,
compared to classic COM plugins (which are also still supported by 2013), the
API is very limited. That combined with no backwards compatibility makes me
think that it would have been better to implement this as a COM plugin for
better coverage and functionality...

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stevewilhelm
Any experience embedding an application into Excel?

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bhanks
It is a diagramming app so it is really more useful to add into a word doc or
powerpoint. What use case were you thinking of for Excel?

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stevewilhelm
I wasn't thinking about the LucidChart per say. I was wondering how an Web
based-app could be intergrated into Excel such that a user was prompted to
login and then import user specific data directly into a Excel spreadsheet
range using an REST API.

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T-hawk
Excel has had that capability forever. Excel VBA code had access to
XmlHttpRequest as soon as Internet Explorer did, at version 5.0. XHR is a COM
object that can be invoked from just about anywhere in Microsoftland. I was
doing this in Excel way back in 2000.

Nowadays XHR is a bit limited as far as exception handling and other niceties
you'd like for API calling. But Excel VBA can access anything through COM
interop, such as a more robust C# library using .NET objects like
HttpWebRequest.

Excel also has a notion of web queries, to populate a range by making an HTTP
request and scraping a table out of the HTML. I think that existed as long ago
as Excel 2000 and was brought out to the UI in 2007. It doesn't play well with
websites requiring a login or a nontrivial click path, though. I have vague
memories of wrestling with this, through the spectacular method of launching
an IE window from Excel and relying on the MSHTML layer to share the login
cookies between that and Excel!

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bambax
This whole "tabbed apps for MS Office" business looks interesting -- any
tutorial anyone would recommend for getting started?

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oboizt
Microsoft's Development Center has a lot of good information on building apps
as well as documentation on all the APIs.

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/apps>

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ww520
This brings back memory of OLE/COM/ActiveX control.

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YeahKIA
This looks so much better than the vbscript API from the past. Is it as
functional?

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oboizt
The Apps for Office API seems to be fairly limited right now to reading from a
document and inserting text and images. For insertion, you can only insert
data at the cursor point or replace currently selected text. There aren't yet
options to move the cursor or insert more advanced document objects.
(Although, the Outlook Mail apps are an entirely different story) I think the
typical use cases that work well with this API are easier information
retrieval while working on a document and inserting images or passages of
text.

