Office Add-in Development Community (PnP) – October 2020 update

Office Add-ins team

The Office Add-ins platform team has new updates to share this month on Office Add-ins Patterns and Practices. PnP is a community effort, so if you are interested in contributing, see our good first issue list.

Open Excel from your web page and embed your Office Add-in

Illustration showing Excel opened directly from the button on your website and your add-in automatically opened in the document with the selected data

Extend your SaaS web application so that your customers can open their data from a web page directly to Microsoft Excel. A common scenario is that customers will be working with data in your web application. Then they’ll want to copy the data into an Excel document. For example, they may want to perform additional analysis using Excel. Typically, the customer is required to export the data to a file, such as a .csv file, and then import that data into Excel. They also have to manually add your Office Add-in to the document.

Reduce the number of steps to a single button click on your web page that generates and opens the Excel document. You can also embed your Office Add-in inside the document and display it when the document opens. This ensures the customer still has access to your application features. When the document opens, the data the customer selected, and your Office Add-in is already available for them to continue working.

Contributors

Thank you to our contributors who are actively helping each month with the PnP community effort.

  • Maarten van Stam @aafvstam (helping review PRs and issues on PnP-OfficeAddins)

Want to contribute?

PnP is a community effort by developers like you. Check out our good first issue list as a great place to help with some samples. Feel free to contribute to existing samples or create new ones.

About Office Add-ins Patterns & Practices (PnP)

Office Add-ins PnP is a Microsoft-led, community driven effort that helps developers extend, build, and provision customizations on the Office platform the right way by providing guidance and help through official documentation and open source initiatives. The source is maintained in GitHub where anyone can participate. You can provide contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation. Office Add-ins PnP is owned and coordinated by Office engineering teams, but the work is done by the community for the community.

You can find code samples for Office Add-in development in the Office Add-ins PnP repo. Some samples are also documented in the Office Add-ins docs, such as Batching custom function calls for a remote service.

Additional resources

Learn more by joining the monthly Office Add-ins community call.

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