Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 24 Mar 2023

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From YouTube: Word Extensibility APIs (Preview) - March 2023

Description

A 10-minute Developer-focused demo from Yun Wang. Five Word desktop APIs reviewed in last month’s call plus 3 new features (Application.retrieveStylesFromBase64, recognize deleted content controls and plain text content control support), are available now for you to test. Requires running desktop version 16.0.16130.20218 and above. Hear about all 8 desktop features plus 1 new Word online feature “Track changes for content controls” is now in production. Targeting mid-year GA on features.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Office Add-ins community call – March 2023, recorded on March 8, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Yun Wang, Principal Product Manager (Microsoft)

Supporting documents
• Documentation - Word JavaScript preview APIs | https://learn.microsoft.com/javascript/api/requirement-sets/word/word-preview-apis
• Call Registration Form – Call for Word writing assistant partners – March 8, 2023, 5:00 PM | https://forms.office.com/r/jqBHuxWy4S
• February Topic - Upcoming Preview Word APIs - March 2023 - Yun Wang, Principal Product Manager (Microsoft) | https://youtu.be/bUcpzn28VKs?t=883

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home

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It lasts the community call. We said that we will have some new apis to be in a preview requirement, Set uh and today I'm very happy to tell you that you know if you you go to our work. Javascript to preview, API webpage you'll see those apis available there and from today you actually can start to test these apis for your requirements and we will have these apis supported with the version listed here.

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So with this version on the page and above you can leverage this API, of course you will need to leverage the beta cdns in order to test the preview requirement set. So there are several features here. Last time I went through some of these, but I can do a quick uh going through of these items, so we have some updates for insert file from base64, which I will show a demo later around. Basically, this is used for inserting files from another document into the current working document, with all the formats kept.

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So previously we had a problem that when you do the insert file, you know you will lose some formatting information as well as other settings, so I'll show a demo for that, and also we have some styling related apis, which you can retrieve styles from a base, 64 format and then apply them into your current document. So the use case here is that you can have your add-in to list out all the files from existing documents and have your users directly choose the cell settings from that document and apply them into your current one.

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So this will benefit for you there for for those users that who want to reuse the formatting and style settings from existing document, and we also can now recognize the deleted content controls of Attraction just as long so previously when you try to get all the content controls uh within the document, you cannot tell you know which ones are the deleted ones and which, which ones are the normal ones, especially when you turn on the track changes.

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So now we have a API an option for you to categorize different content controls in different states, which I will show another demo as well. Today we support plain text, content control, API and starting from the desktop version and later on, we will have some updates for water online for this 10 text, counting control as well um I'll enter on access. Continental events are the two newly added events where you know people will have the the capability for more control of the accounting control events.

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Save close API allows you to save a document or close the document, so here we only support the operations for these two apis. We haven't supported the events for these two actions, but this this is something we can consider for future and also we support field apis as well. So please, if you have interested, please start to testing these apis and provide us early feedbacks, because for these preview apis we want to have them to be G8 in the coming months. So your feedbacks are very important.

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We also have some updates for word online and we have track changes, support for Content controls in production, so this is also a great news for many of our partners. Now you can have this capability for word online, and it is something you can try out as well today, because it's also in the production.

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Okay, now I I can share you a demo for two apis. One is insert file from base64 and another one is. How do you recognize different content controls when track changes installed.

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So, firstly, I'll demoed insert file from base64., as you can see from the document. So this is the document I want to insert into a Target document. So in this document you can see that we have a different format, so we have track changes settings. We have those items that are not accepted, yet we also have like content controls inside this document.

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Furthermore, we have like watermarks, we have page borders Etc, so so different settings for this document and now I can create a new document and I'll try to open up my group lab here, because we prepared some code snip here and I can show you the result of running this code. So I can choose that file right. I just showed you insert file from big six four source.

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So with this I can insert the content into your current document. You can see that everything has been retained, especially for the page border and for the previous not accepted changes as well as the style settings. So if you take a look at here, you know the cell settings is also changed. For example, if y go to the cells and go to The Heading one, so it has already modified with the source document, and we also have the content controls inserted here, so you'll be wondering how how we do this.

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Actually, we provide the different options here. So let's go inside the code. Snippet here you can see from here is that we have added a new function called insert file from base64.. It is not the existing one, so existing ones are based on the body class. But now you know at the document level we have this new function.

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So for this one we provide the different options so replace so for this replaced option, which means that you could replace the entire document with the inserted file and we also provide like add or append capability which allows you to add content at the inserted file and append it to your existing document or existing content. We also provide different options to allow you to have the document level settings. As I mentioned, like this, the the theme or the cells page color, as well as the tracking mode.

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These can all be controlled by developers whether to retain the uh the source document level settings when doing the insertion okay. So this is the for the insert file from base64 and we also have another API released I'll open up this again, so we also can recognize the deleted content controls. So from here you can see that we have like three content controls uh which are deleted as one entity and also we have two newly inserted content controls here and we have one normal content controls. So we actually can recognize these.

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For example, we can get from this test, so we can get the number of the normal content controls. So we can do uh you know, get the deleted content controls and also the added content controls. So this will help our customers to better categorize different uh state of the company we chose in under track changes mode. We actually from the code. Here we actually return different content control collections for each state, so you actually can have the settings say you know which type which state of the content control you want to select from the section.

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So, firstly, from here you could see that, firstly, you will need to get all the content controls at your body level, and then you know with that Continental collection. You can do the the get by change track. Tracking States function to get the subset of the controls.

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So that's the quick demo of this and I'll go back my presentation um looking forward in next Community call. We will provide more demos for you so that you could understand more of our preview E-class set again. You know just to remind you that you know we. We have planned to release these apis in the coming months, so your input and testing results are very, very important for us.

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We also we are calling for writing assistant Partners. You can see we started to invest more on world extensibility from last year and we actually provide the different support covering different scenarios such as citation management document, assembly, content, insertion and so on, and writing assistant is something we start to have more focusing on. So we would like to have Partners being on board and work with us for some requirement. Discussions as well as a feature co-work Etc.

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So if you have interest, please fill the form here and submit the request so that we can contact you later on. That's all for today thanks very much awesome. That was a great demo and a lot of good updates. Thank you. So much Yoon.