Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 10 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: Office Add-ins community call – November 2022

Description

This month's community call topics include Working with Partial Documents in PowerPoint (Large files are broken up for faster downloading) - John Teichman - Principal Product Manager and Onur Onder - Senior Software Engineer (Microsoft), Content control enhancements in Word Online (what’s new and in the works) - Maja Damjanić - Senior Product Manager (Microsoft) and Search Bar for Office Add-ins (Help users find their add-ins) - Adrian Wu: Senior Product Manager (Microsoft), and Q&A at end of call and in chat throughout call. The call was hosted by Preethika Kiruveedula (Microsoft). Recorded November 9, 2022.

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• See the full blog post for this call in the Microsoft 365 platform community blog - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/blog
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• Link to all Microsoft Developer Community calls - https://aka.ms/M365DevCalls
• Submit questions for next community call - https://aka.ms/officeaddinsform
• Next community call – December 14th at 08:00am PT - https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall

A

Foreign good morning, everyone thanks for joining today's November, 9th Adams Community call. We have quite a few things on the agenda today, so I will quickly go over them. So, first we'll be starting out by going over working with partial documents in PowerPoint, we will then proceed to introduce new content, control, enhancements and word online and also discuss a search bar for office add-ins functionality.

A

So our presenters today will be John, teichmann who's, a principal product manager at Microsoft, owner Ander, who's, a senior software engineer, Maja, Dum, johnik who's, also, a senior product manager and Adrian Wu, who is a senior product manager as well and with that being said, I will hand it off to John and owner to start their presentation. Okay,.

B

Thanks a lot, and uh so uh welcome everybody good morning or good evening and afternoon, wherever you are um we'll start off by describing why we're doing partial docs in the first place and then give you just a metaphorical example of how it works and then um owner will take you through kind of the implications for add-in developers, so you guys know and can be prepared.

B

The time Horizon for this is is pretty far out, but we just wanted to get this out in front of you early, but you know mid mid next year at the earliest. So just kind of you know get your input, let you know what's coming and uh we'll go from there.

B

So, first of all, the reason we're doing this is that we've observed that PowerPoint file sizes are growing exponentially, and this is due to a trend in storytelling where video is becoming increasingly important um and the formats per video are becoming increasingly large in size, so with HD, video and high-res, imagery, etc. For storytelling, we've observed a growth in the size of files, and you can see that on the right hand, chart it says, file size over time.

B

You can see that from 2017 to 21 the trend is, um you know, we're getting much much larger file sizes. So this is, we believe this is going to increase and download speeds are not keeping up with the file size, so you know even with enhancements in networking, and you know just the realities and the physics of uh transporting bits.

B

um Don't bode well for opening very, very large files over you know through the cloud um you can see in the chart below. This is 2021 data, but you know it's representative and the global medium uh speeds for downloads for a 319 megabyte file. You can see even if it was a perfect world, and there was no time required for us to prepare the document and open it and send it to you just the download speed alone. It would take 44 seconds to open on a desktop and even worse, on a mobile up.

B

You know up in the range of 90 seconds. So when you consider these kind of factors, it really necessitates a new approach. We can't you know, keep customers waiting when they're trying to open and collaborate on their documents. So what we did was in an analysis of how the you know the components of PowerPoint files, and you can see that on the chart on your right here. It's on the bottom right.

B

It says: file, size, buckets, um I, I, apologize for it being a little bit small to read in the teams, but basically the takeaway from this one is that the blue is video and the yellow is imagery.

B

So the you know the majority, the overwhelming majority of the size of files comes from video and imagery, so that leads us to partial Docs. Now I'm going. You know this is a little bit Secret Sauce, so I'm going to describe it to you using a metaphor here so bear with me um we'll just we'll describe partial docs with your favorite cheeses to get the idea across in the database. We're now storing the document as Parts.

B

If you think about it in the old way, we used to store it as the full brick of cheese and to get that cheese to you. We would have to download that whole big thing, but now what we do is we break it up into slices and we store it in the database as such. So it's a completely different method for storage and transport, and what that allows us to do is give you the whole functional presentation very, very quickly.

B

So, as you saw in the chart earlier, the large part is images and video, so we're starting with video. But imagine this little piece of cheese. All the holes are the video so you're going to get a working PowerPoint document that you can collaborate on very, very fast and basically it will. It will be functional and what will happen in the background? As you continue to collaborate is the holes will be filled in as you work.

B

So, in the background, the video will continue to load and you'll basically end up with the entire presentation, but with the benefit of having been able to get in and edit and do your work early. So the the the big benefits are you're going to be able to download your documents very quickly.

B

um This benefit will become more apparent.

B

The larger the file size, um the media size in the file um your time to edit and collaborate and present in a PowerPoint presentation will be substantially improved as a result and your um your co-auth performance and stability will be enhanced, so um I'm not sure if any of you are familiar but like if you load a large video file in a collab session today, things will lock up and and you'll you'll, just kind of be on hold for a little bit until it's done, whereas this will allow everything to kind of go asynchronously in the background.

B

So that's that's the concept now. With that I'll hand it over to owner to take you through the implications for add-in developers, because, obviously, if there's deferred content- and you have an add-in, that's calling a piece of deferred content, you're going to need ways to um interact with that and wait until it's available so owner. Do you want to take it from here.

C

Thank you John. Thank you. Thanks for the nice introduction, that's too correct, yeah, so everything um that impacts the object mode is kind of explained in this documentation, page which you can reach from this link, and it has a bunch of information and examples on how this affects the operation of these object model calls. This affects both Visual Basic com, add-ins and as well as officejs add-ins and for the main part actually is. One of the main properties of the presentation is presentation is fully download property.

C

You can reach to the documentation from this link, and here is the sample example on this.

C

For example, when you, when the adding calls active presentation, is fully downloaded the this checks, if the everything on this presentation is fully downloaded or not, and note that a presentation might have everything fully downloaded and and another co-authoring user might have added a another video file which will make this false, which will start returning uh as false so from the add-in world, they can understand the state of the document where it's fully download, where everything is there or not. However, what happens when you try to act on those incomplete objects is something like this.

C

For example, a copy operation requires the object to be fully there. If it's not, then it will throw an exception, actually draw an error. In this case, you can look at the error code and understand that this error is due to the incompleteness of this object. So something in this slide, for example, will throw this error, but it will only throw this error if something in that slide is missing, there might be other video objects that are not fully downloaded in slide.

C

Other slides, like like five six, but only if slide one here in this example. If it's missing, then this will troll this error, and um here are the complete list of object model calls which are affected by this change. Most of them require a fully downloaded object. For example, a presentation save as operation require the entire presentation to be there. Otherwise it will, it will not be able to save anything, say the entire presentation as expected, whereas a shape also requires its own properties. To be there, a shape may contain a media part.

C

An image or video part, and until those are fully there, this this operation will not succeed, and this is the only operation in PowerPoint, officejf API site get file I think similar to save as it allows you to download the file or the document note that the current officejx documentation is not yet updated, but it will be with the upcoming changes.

C

um We know this is a large change and we may possibly break some existing comb based add-ins. We would like to give some heads up before it goes live and we would like to get some feedback from you. If, if you have any concerns or any other questions, you can send your comments and questions to this PPT partial docs feedback email address and thank you very much for listening back to you. Pritika.

A

Great thank you John and owner. That was an awesome presentation.

A

Moving forward, uh Maja will not be going over content control enhancements in word online.

D

Hey so hi everyone I'm part of the word team, focusing on word extensibility for basically trying me and my team we're basically trying to make word a better host app for all of uh applications and for all app developers out there uh to start just a quick recap on what content controls are.

D

I know many of you, or most of you are probably familiar, but uh bear with me for a little bit so content controls are basically word entities that act as containers for specific content in a document as such they're ideal for creating structured documents like templates or forms they help, you fix position of the content, specify the type and and the kind of the content restrict or enable editing, and you name it.

D

The typical usage scenario we've been seeing is that end users create Word documents using the templates with some placeholders, where all of those templates are provided by the add-ins. The end users then added those placeholders, customize them and they typically save back to whatever the company's document management system is.

D

um Sometimes. This is also done collaborative manner, even real-time, co-authoring manner. The the full list of content controls, which is here in the slide, is supported as of Word 2013, so for quite some time um a little bit about creating content controls. The easiest way is obviously through the UI, using the developer tab in ribbon for scenarios which require automation. They can also be created and modified programmatically using apis.

D

uh Now, all that I've mentioned is for the content. Controls capabilities in word, desktop app uh because uh for uh word online the situation is a bit different uh word online. Does not support developer tabs, so it's not possible to add new content controls that way, but for documents which do contain content controls which are authored some other way. uh The situation is as follows: so for viewing most of the content, control types will be rendered.

D

As expected, there are some minor gaps for rendering is partially supported, but in let's say, majority of the cases everything will will be just fine. Now when it comes to editing uh here is where the differences become bigger.

D

The only type of content controls which is supported for editing is Rich, Text, content control, and if we look at the situation at Summer of this year of 2022, it was not even fully supported, meaning there was still some gaps if, if we go and compare it to what's the situation in in word desktop client when it comes to programmatic access, the state is obviously you can only work with content controls in word online through officejs and the only supported type of content controls is the rich text content control.

D

Now all of that being said, some of you may remember. We.

D

About structured document authoring, this was this was sometimes end of the summer. I, don't remember, which month exactly was, but uh we also then shared some preliminary results. uh We we got from from the survey and, in fact, based on the feedback collected through this channel through some other channels as well. We we're looking at the GitHub issues. We were looking at all the feedback shared and in all of the places we picked a first set of content control improvements to to tackle in word online, and uh this is what's what's new.

D

What's new and word online, so uh I mean looking at at all of the feedback. We realized Rich Text content controls are by far the most used and the most popular ones, so it made sense to start with actually improving the existing support for It Rich Text content controls. What what that means is uh we wanted to improve the parity between what's possible in the desktop client and what's possible and word online, and the things that you see listed are just some some of the enhancements we did for Rich Text.

D

So we started with uh making parody with a select delete operations between online and desktop. We added support for editing content controls inside tables, which was one of the pretty common scenarios we've been hearing about. We added support for editing of empty content controls. uh We enhanced the support for manipulating of inline content controls, and there were many other smaller things that we did based on on all of the feedback we got and all of the issues that were floating around on on GitHub, and this was our first step as the next step.

D

We added support for plain text, content controls editing now this one is actually just starting to roll out to production, so everything I mentioned for the rich text, content control, that's already available and out there, and you are welcome to try it out. The support for plain text has just starting the role allowed to production, so it should be available to some people, but it's it's going to be available for everyone in the coming weeks, and these are the things that are already out there.

D

Now we're not gonna stop there. So we have some additional things in the pipeline. We will continue doing the enhancements on both Rich text and plain text. Content control support, our our goal is, as I mentioned, to get to full parity uh between online and desktop, and some of the next big things that are coming are support for cut copy and paste operations, and then support for hidden content controls and one of the larger additional items that's also in in the pipeline is support for track changes for Content controls, so those are.

D

Those are the things that that we wanted to share with you. um We wanted to let you know what are the things which are already out there. uh We encourage you to try it out if you use content controls and your add-ins depend on them, and uh we would like to keep getting your feedback.

D

um The survey that we mentioned is still out there. um It's open, you can still participate. Please do let us know what would you like to see next in this area? uh What are the things that you're using? What are the things that you're missing feel free to leave your contact details? If you would like to talk to us uh and yeah, that's that's pretty much it if you have any questions, uh feel free to interact over chat.

D

Okay, go back to you!.

A

Great thanks, majo. That was a great presentation moving forward um Adrian. Would you like to start presenting.

E

Okay, no problem: okay, let's get started so hi good morning uh good evening, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Adrian and I'm the product manager from the office platform team and I'm, currently in charge of the uh adding discoverability across wxp.

E

So it's been a really nice chance to be able to share with you, like some of our latest progress these days. So as you know that we have been trying to uh improve the overall discoverability of the whole adding alcohol system these days and in hope that, with more and more like users, they get to know about like what addings can do for them and we can really build the whole ecosystem bigger together.

E

So uh we would like to share with you, like one of our latest features today, like that users are now being able to search for their addings from the search box on the top of the wxp.

E

So actually, the scenario just asked what we uh the the screenshot, that we show uh it's actually quite straightforward and simple, but we believe that um this could really help like lots of users with their current uh experience.

E

um As we know that um as one of uh part of the feature that adding developers they can specify like uh their add-in placement on the ribbon today. So we see like uh some of the developers would choose to like, for example, like build their own like tabs to host like their addings and also like some of the add-ins are choose to be be included in the Like Home tab or, for example, insert tab, but in the meanwhile we often get like users are asking about like.

E

Where do they can actually find their earnings, because, like there's, currently no easy way for them to locate where these addings are about? And they have to go like uh check each steps one by one? So so we want to provide a user and like very easy and straightforward way for they to find their addings. So that's what we're doing today of this feature will be across a word excel PowerPoint and uh across the online and windows.

E

Endpoints and users can search from the uh tell me service, which is the search which is the search box of their uh already installed addings, which will be like, for example, some addings. They they installed it by themselves before or some addings, that was Central deployed by their domains, and we will keep releasing these features and starting from World online and then Excel and then for the other endpoints.

E

For uh the detail like experience detail here, I would like to point out like, uh since these days like there's actually like multiple ways. We can open a we can. We can start using and adding like to be more specific, like some addings. uh If they only have one test pen or they only have like one, uh they have set their default test.

E

Pen and after the users can, after user search it from the search box, they can have a experience that click and then launch the test pen directly, and this will be our recommended way, but uh for some addings, if they have multiple test pens, then today we will only navigate users to the ribbon Tab and things like we are like keep improving the user experience and in the future we will have like more more and more like this kind of like click and launch experience.

E

So we will also like to use the this chance to to recommend like if you're, if that's your case, that we can find a default test pen as a man interest, we would highly recommend you to try to config a default test pen. So in the future it will like provide user with better user experience and I also leave the link here. So if you are interested about okay, how can I config a default test plan?

E

You can you can scan the QR code or um or use the link that I will put in the chat box like soon yeah? So that's basically about my sharing today. If you have any questions, you can leave in the chat, yeah, okay, so give back to prasika.

A

Awesome thanks, Adrian, okay, we will now be moving on to the Q a portion, so we got our questions relative, so we haven't had a chance to track down the answers, so they'll be put into the blog post, but just for context. One of the questions was my clients want Outlook Onsen add-in to be available in appsource. Appsource currently does not allow onsend add-ins when will appsource accept onset and add-ins. So we'll find this answer and then place it into the blog post so be on the lookout.

A

For that this one was a bit longer so I'm not going to read the full question, but it will be in the PowerPoint file also that will be in the blog post for anyone interested, but the gist is that they have enabled SSL by registering the app in aad from the Outlook app it's getting authenticated and Landing to the Razer page, um and they were just curious if there's any difference when loading from the app and from the browser.

A

So once again, if you are new to the office, Adams Community call here are some links in terms of our documentation. Quick starts and samples, and a few other things that might be helpful to get started to engage with the team. If you have typical technical questions about office, add-ins feel free to go to this link right here: aka.ms office, add-ins, Dev questions or stack Overflow.

A

If you have bugs um submit an issue and office, the office.js GitHub page and for feature requests and ideas, we have a M365 Dev suggestions page, and we have a few different calls that you can also attend if you're interested in these um topics feel free to join those as well, and thank you. The recording will be available in 24 hours, we'll have a blog post out as well, and our next call will be December 14th at 8am and feel free to leave any questions prior to the call, if you would like them answered before.

A