The WordMeister

There’s lots of good information available for working with and developing Office applications, it’s just a question of knowing where to find it. Here are some of the links I find most useful.
MVP websites
MSDN forums & blogs
Office 2010 Language References
Office Fluent UI (Ribbon)
Office Open XML file formats
Pre-2007 Office binary file formats
Office 2013 “Apps”
Creating spell checker extensions

Office end-user forums for non-programming related questions can be found on Answers. Generally, you’ll find many more people how know how to use the application here than in the programming forums. There are also informative sites maintained by (former) Office MVPs:

• The mvps.org site maintained by MVPs
• Greg Maxey
• Graham Mayor
• Shauna Kelly
• Suzanne Barnhill

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Office Development

Over time, the technologies  for developing with Office applications have grown and diverged. Since Office 1997 the core Office applications have object models (APIs) designed to work with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), a subset and extension of classic VB. Everyone who wants to automate an Office application works with these interfaces; .NET developers tend to say they work with the “interop” (short for interoperability). Discussions about this type of Office development are best asked in the following MSDN forums:

• Word for Developers
• Excel for Developers
• Access for Developers
• Outlook for Developers
• General Office Developement  (for all other Office apps)
• Visual Studio Tools for Office (a special technology for .NET “code behind” in Excel and Word as well as .NET Add-ins)
• Andrew Whitechapel’s blog (“the” Office developer guru)

VBA developers are accustomed to using the Help installed with Office. Other developers can use that, or they can consult the Language Reference information on-line on MSDN. From this starting point you can access the information for each Office application.
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In Office 2007 the Ribbon UI replaced the toolbars and menus that provided the user interface since the beginning of the Office applications for Windows. In Office 2010 the concept was expanded to include context (right-click) menus and the choices available through the File menu (the “Backstage”) and is now known as the “Office Fluent UI”.

• Office Fluent UI start page on MSDN
• Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 1 of 3)
• Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 2 of 3)
• Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 3 of 3)
• Introduction to the Office 2010 Backstage View for Developers
• Customizing Context Menus in Office 2010
• Custom UI Editor (free download tool)
• List of Control IDs for the 2007 Office System (List of built-in control IDs)
• Office 2010 Fluent User Interface Control Identifiers (List of built-in control IDs)
• Office 2010 Add-in: Icons Gallery (List of built-in icons that can be re-used)
• Ribbon Accessibility  (APIs for manipulating the Ribbon)

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A new technology was introduced with the new file formats in Office 2007. It is no longer necessary to automate an Office application in order to create and work with Office files. Any programming language that can work with standard ZIP packages and XML can manipulate an “Office Open XML” file directly.

• OpenXMLDeveloper.org (your first stop for learning about working with Office file formats)
• Overview of the ECMA standard for Office Open XML.
• ECMA Standard documentation for Office Open XML (free download).
• Office Open XML file format implementation  (forum for discussing the structure of the underlying ECMA standard)
• Open XML SDK  (forum for Visual Studio .NET technology for working with Office documents)
• Open XML SDK  (MSDN documentation)

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Since release of the new file formats, the specifications for the old, proprietary binary file formats have been made public. For those needing to work with pre-2007 files outside the Office application:

• Obtaining Microsoft Office File Format Documents
• Forum for discussing old Office file formats

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 With Office 2013, Microsoft has introduced a new technology “Apps for Office” that bases on HTML5 and JavaScript. It works both with the “Web apps” as well as with the traditional desktop installation of Office and is tightly integrated into SharePoint. At the moment, the capabilities of an “App” to interact with an Office application are severely limited when compared to working with the traditional object model. An “App” can basically only interact with the current selection, not with the entire application or document.

• Apps for Office forum
• Apps for Office documentation on MSDN

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Developers regularly ask how they can hook into Word’s spell check or design their own spelling dictionary. It’s not possible to use the built-in engines and dictionaries provided with Office, but Microsoft does provide an interface that third-party engines can hook into. More information can be found here.

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