In my last post we talked about the document inspector (DI) functionality available out of the box in the Office Word 2007; however, we neglected to cover all of the rich extensibility that's possible. So, after some delay, here we go. We can create new inspector modules in unmanaged and managed code. A "DocumentInspectors" collection type is available in Office Word, Office Excel, and Office PowerPoint 2007 and is implementable in Microsoft VBA (A relatively detailed explanation of the DocumentInspectors collection as well as a sample custom module and other inspector information can be found HERE). So, let's run through a scenario where we may want to customize our DI. Let's say I happen to run a small, but rapidly expanding, lemonade company that does a lot of print advertising (thinking back to one of my favorite games here). Lately I've had a lot of customer complaints because our ads say that we GUARANTEE the highest quality lemonade available. Turns out that a certain level of unpredictability in the lemon market makes some batches taste different and our customers are unhappy, and feel misled by our guarantee. Well,
Office Pro Plus 2007 Key, moving forward I want to ensure none of my employees are using GUARANTEE and instead are using, WE WORK THE HARDEST TO PROVIDE. This post will cover the first few steps and then we will continue building our add-on over the next week or so. Unfortunately, this means your lemonade stand won't become the biggest just quite yet. To create the project: I am using Visual Studio 2005 to create my custom module. Let's go ahead and launch Visual Studio and create a new project. Click other project types,
Buy Windows 7, and under that, choose extensibility. Now in the templates pane, we are going to choose the shared add-in option. I chose to name my add-in the same as the one in our whitepaper,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, so to follow us,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, use SearchReplaceKeyword as your name. On the next page, deselect every product with the exception of Word. The next page in the wizard prompts you to put in a name and description. This is the name that will be shown in the options dialogue box in Word. You can enter a short description to describe functionality as well. On the next screen choose "I would like my add-in to load when then…" and click next and then finish. We have walked through starting the project in this post, the next one will focus on actually writing the small amount of code that is required. For anyone that wants to go out and do this now, the white paper will give you the same thing in a more dry manner. I think it would be really cool to see what add-ins people have ideas for or have already built. Please get post those comments up there with anything you thought up,
Purchase Office 2010! -Reed Shaffner <div