Thursday, March 15, 2007

VSTO SE only works with Office 2003 Professional

I think I have finally established that VSTO SE only works with Office 2003 Professional (or any version of Office 2007) when using document level applications, Office 2003 Standard is not supported. Apparently you can install application level apps on Office 2003 Standard (although I have not tested this).

This Microsoft document http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library//2ac08ee2(vs.80).aspx which indicates that VSTO SE will install on Office 2003 Standard is therefore wrong, or at best incomplete, as in fact only application level apps are supported on Office 2003 Standard.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,

You have two separate issues mentioned: installing VSTO 2005 SE and deploying document level add-ins.

VSTO 2005 requires that Microsoft Office Professional 2003 or a standalone version be already installed as stated here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/54ds2za4(VS.80).aspx under "The following software is required to install VSTO 2005".

VSTO 2005 SE needs to install on top of VSTO 2005 or with Visual Studio Pro also at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/54ds2za4(VS.80).aspx under "The following software is required to install VSTO 2005 SE". VSTO 2005 SE expands the Office supported list to include Microsoft Office Standard 2003.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa942839(VS.80).aspx shows that doc-level customizations do work for Word 2003 and Excel 2003 when developed with VSTO 2005 SE.

Admittedly, VSTO information is found amongst many different MSDN topics, but two other sources of information include the following:
http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto2/
and
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=16&siteid=1

Hope to see you there.

Mary Lee
Microsoft

Andrew Jones said...

Mary,

Thanks for the feedback. The security requirements and lack of warning when installing a client app on Excel 2003 Standard very nearly made me give up on VSTO.

I wasted days trying to get my app to run on Excel standard. Please consider a warning message for future versions.

I'm glad I stuck with it as I've created a couple of really cool Excel apps that use very little c#.