Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 8 Mar 2023

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From YouTube: Office Add-ins community call – March 2023

Description

This month's featured community call topic: Word Extensibility APIs (Preview) - March 2023 - Yun Wang, Principal Product Manager (Microsoft). Eight Word desktop API features are ready for you to test along with 1 new Word online API feature. Three questions are formally addressed in this month’s Q&A, other topics addressed in chat throughout the call. The call was hosted by Preethika Kiruveedula (Microsoft). Recorded on March 8, 2023.

Agenda
00:00 – Intro
00:32 – Topic - Word Extensibility APIs (Preview) - March 2023 - Yun Wang, Principal Product Manager (Microsoft)
10:59 – Q&A – Preethika Kiruveedula, Product Manager (Microsoft)
13:37 – Resources
14:52 – Closing

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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 – April 12th at 08:00am PT - https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall

A

B

Good morning or good evening, depending on your time zone, thank you for joining the March office, add-ins Community call. We have a relatively short call today with only one item on the agenda, so we will be going over that shortly, but other than that we'll go ahead and get started so on our agenda. Today we will be having a board accessibility updates from Yoon. So this is an update on top of what we had at last month's Community call so we'll be following up on that.

B

So, as I mentioned before, our presenter today will be Yoon, Wang who's, a principal product manager at Microsoft and he'll, be taking it away with our word extensibility update. Thank you.

A

Hello, everyone so I'll give a update for world exclusibility. It lasts, the community call. We said that we will have some new apis to be in a preview requirement set, 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.

A

So with this version on the page and above you can leverage these 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 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.

A

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 cells from the existing document and have your users directly choose the cell settings from that document and apply them into your current one.

A

So this will benefit for you there 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 down the track changes.

A

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, content control as well um I'll enter on access account. Events are the two newly added events where you know people will have the the capability for more control of the content control events.

A

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.

A

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.

A

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 uh when track changes is gone?.

A

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.

A

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.

A

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 sales 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 we do this.

A

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.

A

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 Styles page color, as well as the tracking mode. These can all be controlled by developers.

A

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.

A

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 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 cloud section.

A

So, firstly, from here you could see that, firstly, you will need to get all the content controls as 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.

A

So that's the quick demo of this and I'll go back to 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.

A

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 a 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.

A

So if you have interest, please fill the form here and submit a request so that we can contact you later on. That's all for today, thanks very much.

B

Awesome that was a great demo and a lot of good updates. Thank you. So much Yoon, yes just come stay tuned for the next Community call next month and we'll have more updates here so moving forward.

B

So those were all our presenters for this month's Community call, but we do have three questions in the Q, a section that we will be going over. So the first question was: will the task pane in Outlook add-in support change their default width, so the task being an Outlook that comes up when you develop an Outlook add-in has a default width right now and we currently don't have any plans to support this in the near future. But if that changes anytime soon, we will let you know, but for now it'll maintain its default width value.

B

Our second question was I'm. Looking at developing an add-in for PowerPoint as the task Pane and content add-in have different functions. Are we able to essentially combine them into one add-in for the user, or are there any issues with having two types of add-ins with one ad and drawing information from the other would also like to know if there are any restrictions or security issues from developing the ad in this way? So when it comes to this question, it is currently not possible to develop a task Pane and content add-in in one add-in project.

B

So you would have to have two as in for the fact that these types of add-ins have different functionalities typically, but if you would like to submit a feature request for being able to do that, please give us more information about your specific scenario and what you're trying to achieve in the following Dev suggestions link and we can go from there once you provide us with more info on what your exact scenario is and provide you with more information.

B

Lastly, this is a bit more lengthy question. So last month we had a few presentations about Outlook events, so that isps can migrate their existing Outlook com add-ins to the new web-based add-ins. So, on top of that presentation, there are a few questions that came in so first of all, the question was the ability to display a dialogue when compose reply. Reply all or forward is clicked. The customer wants to either display a warning or in some places like the compose. They want to force the user to select from a list of predefined subjects.

B

This is for a help desk scenario. Other customers want to see a very prominent prompt show up when clicking on reply all, and the second question was the ability to support onsend, Outlook events or smart alerts in iPhone or Android.

B

This is a frequent request from our customers and we need a roadmap from The Office Team to know whether this is a planned feature or not, and what to tell our customers so I'm, currently, following up with the presenters who presented about this at two Community calls ago, so once I get more updates from them, I will add the answers in the blog post that will come out in the next couple weeks post.

B

This community call so stay tuned for that and in the off chance that we're unable to answer in the blog post it'll be present in next month's Community call. So just some quick PSAs. If this is your first office, Adams Community call that you've attended before um we're very glad to have you here. So we do have a few links where you can learn more about our community call forum for office Adams specifically, so we have some documentation. A few quick starts for the different office suite.

B

We have a link to our script, lab repo, a few samples on how to get started with office, add-ins a link to the Microsoft 365 developer program, if you'd like to enroll in that and also a link to office scripts, which is another product we have on our team and if you'd like to engage with our team further. If you have any technical questions, please go to the link shown here or you can also go to stack Overflow.

B

We monitor both of those relatively frequently in terms of product bugs we have our officejs repo and you can always file an issue there and our team will go triage them soon and, as I said before, feature requests and ideas. We have the M365 Dev suggestions, page where we look into to to see what issues we haven't been focusing on and how we could make our products better and always improve them, and if you want to just send a smile or frown and not give us as much in-depth feedback.

B

You're also welcome to do that feel free to go to inside office and give us a quick thumbs up or a thumbs down, always an option, and there are a lot of other M365 developer. Community calls if you are interested in anything beyond office add-ins. So we have a larger M365 platform call. You can join a Power Platform Viva connections, a SharePoint framework. We have an identity platform and we also have the Power Platform in addition to our typical office.

B

Addends call so, if you're interested in any of those, please follow one of these links and those are also great Community calls you can participate in and the link below just has access to all of them. So that also could be helpful if you want to scroll through and see what might be helpful and that will be all for today. It was a pretty brief, Community call this month. Thank you. So much for joining our recording will be available on the YouTube channel.

B

If you are interested in re-watching anything or you want to learn more about the information we presented and we also have access to all the videos from all past Community calls that you could also watch if you're interested in some of the demos prior to today's presentation and feel free to follow us on Twitter.

B

Our next call will be April 12th at 8, A.M, Pacific, Standard Time at this link right here and once again, if you have any questions that you would like to be highlighted in the next Community call, we have this AK dot, MS Office add-ins form right here, and you could submit your q. A questions that we can enter next month, but that will be all for today. Thank you all for joining we'll see you next month.