Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 12 Oct 2022

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

Description

This month's community call topics include Update the ASP.NET server in Visual Studio (update a task pane an Excel Add-in using the sideloader to point to an updated project) – David Chesnut (Microsoft) and Feedback request for Excel Add-in Auto install launch function (thoughts on making your office JS add-in discoverable and safely auto install and launch it) - Yawei Zhu (Microsoft), Community spotlight – shines on Eric Legault (Eric Legault Consulting), and Q&A at end of call and in chat throughout call. The call was hosted by Preethika Kiruveedula (Microsoft). Recorded October 12, 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 – November 9th at 08:00am PT - https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall

A

Foreign welcome to the October office, Adams Community call. We will be having a bit of a shorter call today than usual due to the fact that today is also Microsoft's ignite conference. If you have a chance to attend that as well today with that being said for our agenda today, we're having two presenters we'll be discussing updating the asp.net server in visual studio, and we also have a feedback request for Excel add-in Auto launch install function. We want to learn what you guys think about it.

A

We want to get feedback about it all right, so our two presenters will be David, Chestnut who's, the senior deck writer at Microsoft and Yahweh Zoo. Who is a senior product manager at Microsoft David? Do you want to take over.

B

Yeah thanks prithika hi everyone. My name is David Chestnut and I want to talk about creating office items in visual studio and how you can update the asp.net template that you get with that all right, so I've got Visual Studio here and I'm, going to create a new project and I'm going to choose the Excel web add-in. This has been around seems like forever in visual studio.

B

uh Give it a name just call it contoso and you'll notice, like the only framework options you get are 4.8 or 4.72, which is pretty old and so I'm going to go ahead and create this. This will create a little task, pane because I'll add in and what I wanted to show is like how you can update that I. Don't know if it's super obvious to folks so I thought maybe I just do a quick demo of how you can do that in case.

B

You want to work with a different framework and what it will do is create two different projects and I was going to talk about those and in particular how you can change some of the settings on the projects all right.

B

So in the solution, Explorer on the right side, you can see there are two projects: there's the contoso web and that's the asp.net server and there's also this contoso project and all this project does is it has the XML file in it, which is the Manifest that describes the office add-in and it side loads it in fact, sometimes what I like to do is just rename this to make it a little more obvious, so I'll just call it like side loader and if you look at the project properties for this in the bottom, you can see.

B

There's a web project and the start document you can change like which client it's launching from desktop to uh browser and so on. So this is where you can control what it's doing. So, what I'm going to do is add a new project by just right, clicking on the solution and we'll say, add a new project I'm going to pick an asp.net core web app I already had my history here. So let's pick that and call it contoso espnet4.

B

Then here I can pick which framework I want. So in this case, like I, could pick dot net course V1 or dot next 6.0. So I'm going to pick the 6.01.

B

And then it should go create that project.

B

And here it is and because it's in alphabetic order it went to the top of the project list and yeah. We can see its structures a little different than the old asp.net Style. So what we can do is now I want to launch this project instead of the old one. So I'll go to my site, loader project and change this you can see and it sees in the solution now so I can pick my contoso asp.net core say: yes, let's associate it with that and just to double check.

B

You always want to make sure your startup projects are correct. It usually does this for you, but you can go ahead and look at it and say: I want the side loader to start, because that will side, load and I want my asp.net core server to start. So that's set to start. So that's good! Then, if we we want to bring over the uh old project.

B

So let's go take a look. The next thing you're going to want to do is just update your manifest. So I want to let this index page because that's what the new project uses, the old one was using this home HTML file.

B

So what you want to do is go into your manifest and you need to update any resources that are pointing at something in the old project. For example, there's these images that were the old projects I want to bring those over which is in this folder. What I can do is just drag this up and put it onto my www root, so I have all those there's also a function file for this particular exercise: I'm not going to use it. It's not necessary for this simple project. I also need to take out this function.

B

File reference up here. This is the file that loads your app commands for, like the buttons If, you have buttons in this case we're not going to have any though, and then the I want to change my home HTML, because that's going to be index so I'll just take it out and leave it at a default which will map to the index page and, let's see if it starts. That should start so as long as I didn't forget anything.

B

So it's going to run the side, loader project and launch Excel and launch the server.

B

So you can see the server launched in its own page, so you can see it's working and we can see over here it's loaded into the task pane and we just have this default uh asp.net page. That comes up. So if we want to do something, that's a little more office-like, we can make a few more changes here.

B

These are just some more things to think about. So let's say I go to this index page in my new project. Let's add I've got some Snippets here.

B

You can use, let's put an input button on there, just to load some sample data and then we're going to put that sample data into the spreadsheet so there's by button, and then I also need to add my on ready call for office, because you want to get notified when it's initialized so copy this code here and what this will do is because we might on ready- uh and this cites JS file gets loaded into each page.

B

That gets that gets shared out and it's going to load some sample data where it just makes up some random values and it's going to call excel.run and get the range B3 to D5 and set the values and context sync. So it writes those values out. Then. The final thing we need to do to make sure this will run is actually pull in officejs from the cdns. So we'll take this script tag here and in this asp.net project it's using these layouts.

B

So I'll go into my layout cshtml at the bottom here I'm going to put in that script, tag I'm going to be sure it's just before the site JS, because site.js is going to use what's in there, so I'm going to get in the right order and let's go ahead and sort of just save and run.

B

B

That's interesting: does this actually work I'm, not sure why that error came up. I might just need to clear the cache. Sometimes when you're editing the same project, um it can get confused. Let me just do that real, quick, let's close, that I always have a shortcut to this web folder. So I can update this just delete all the files in there.

B

Give it another try if it still doesn't work, then what I do is I switch over to the browser just to look and see if there's errors occurring I might have got something in the wrong order. Nope looks like it's fine now so yep inserts the data, so that is how you can update your project to use a different project, and the key is just remember: it's this little side, loader project that you just point to whichever one you want to load.

A

Great thanks David all right, y'all wait. Do you want to start talking about your investigation.

C

Yeah, thank you and hi everyone. This is your way, and some of you may remember me uh trying to promote the open Excel patterns on the commit call in August and after that we want to try to do something more. We want to investigate how we can provide the auto launch: Auto install function to developer to users, since nowadays the user really can have some part-time to find the Excel, addings or other office addings.

C

So we're trying to investigate if we can provide a safe ways on the control way to provide this Auto, install and auto launch function to Developers.

C

So here is the forms QR code that I'd like to invite all of you to scan it and give me the feedbacks about how you can think about this Auto launch scenario and auto launch function can help with your audience growth or your add-ins usage, and we really like to deliver this function with good user experience and under control. We don't like to developer or other people to abuse it, and we really want to use it on on the reasonable scenario.

C

So please help us and give us some feedbacks about how you think about this also launch and auto install functionality. Thank you and.

A

C

Also, ask me questions in the chat. uh What was to be Auto, install yeah I'm, trying to have some scenario like if you use one addings in your file and these add-ins can create some data or some chart or some other elements in this in this file, and you share this file to another users and that user does not have this adding installed. So maybe this is a good scenario that we can Auto install the add-ins for the other users yeah.

C

This is our imaginary scenario that we think it might be reasonable, but we also want need to get some feedback from the real real life developer.

C

If we want to let the use uh Auto install add-ins for user, it might have the experience that this add-ins just pop this touchpad just pop out and have the trust screen and tell the user that these add-ins can be installed. You have to trust it, and this can help with your workbook or your documents. Something like that yeah this is might be a good case. It starts with adding from the bank workbook yes, this. uh Thank you.

C

So very much and I really hope you can fill these forms and and leave leave your contact information that I can reach out to you for further Communications and thank you. I think that that is all my part and I will continue to answer the question in the chat Channel. Thank you.

A

Okay, great thank you. Yahweh.

C

Thank you, vertica.

A

All right, okay, so we also wanted to have a quick Community Spotlight to Eric legal for presenting at the last Community call. um It was great. I always wanted to quickly give him a shout out moving forward.

A

um We also have the Q a section of this call, so these were some questions that were put in the forms prior to today's call. So one of the questions it's pretty long, so I'm going to summarize it, but essentially it was asking about a community call.

A

We had last April where owner had made a presentation regarding PowerPoint apis, and he had a few Snippets um regarding what it would look like on script lab there's been a request to be able to see those and we reached out to him and we'll be posting those soon, probably on the blog, which will be coming out a little bit after this call. So you could probably look there to see those Snippets and another question was: when will the Microsoft Word forms apis be added to office.js?

A

So there's currently no exact plans on when we're going to do that. There's no dates or anything I can provide. It is on our radar, but there's no exact plans on when this will happen.

A

And, lastly, we received this question this morning, so someone was wondering if it was possible to write Outlook add-ins that will work with their Gmail account to set an email, signature and Outlook between about face activation.

A

We haven't had a chance to look into this, so I don't have an answer right now, but it will be answered in the blog post for this month um great. So this is just some quick links if you're new to office add-ins- and you want to learn more once again. This will also be in the blog post how to engage with our team. So if you have technical questions about office, add-ins feel.

B

A

To go to this link right here or go to our stock, overflow and post about it. We also have a product bugs page as well on GitHub, where you can file issues and we'll trade Dodge them and have um set product manager, Engineers, look into it and there's also a feature request and ideas, page and yeah. You can send a reaction, saying if you like office or not.

A

These are the series of calls that we also have um other than the office. Adams Community call, if you're a part of any other platform that you want to look into so feel free to join these as well, and our next Community call will be November 9th at 8, A.M um feel free to add any questions to our forums. Prior to that. um If there's anything you wanted to learn about, because that's it that'll be all for the call today. Thank you.