Creating a Word 2003 Add-In Toolbar

Question

I have been perusing the internet in search of the best way to accomplish this, but have had no luck. If someone here has experience with Office add-ins, I would really appreciate any help, I'm not asking for a solution by any means, just assistance with which direction to take.

The software I'm working on is primarily in VB.Net and C#; IDE is VS2008

Here's my scenario:

• The user opens a Word template from a form within our software (currently just via Process.Start(TemplateFileName.dot)
• New document opens in Word from the template and needs to display a custom toolbar with a button added to it (e.g. btn1)
• The custom toolbar has to be able to receive some parameters, passed from our software (e.g. AccountNumber, PatientName)
• The user then edits the document, and upon clicking btn1, it saves the newly created document, creating a directory on the server from the AccountNumber that was passed in if such a directory does not already exist.
• Closes Word.

I need help with understanding which technologies to use in order to create such an add-in. Considering the functionality is very basic, I didn't know whether a COM add-in would be necessary. I'm not sure what would be the best way to pass values to Word from within our application.

This add-in needs to be deployed to roughly 40 users, ideally I would like to integrate the installation of the add-in into the installation of the software.

All users have Office 2003 installed.

It should only be visible in this particular scenario, e.g. if a user opens Word on their machine independently of this circumstance, I would prefer for the add-in not to be displayed.

I'm a junior dev that has never worked with any kind of MS Office development and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

most easy and no pain with deploy is simple interop. same office version for all users is a key here. a COMAddin with interop is possible but not absolutly necessary. do vba code, custom gui items and macros to the .dot file if you want. i think this is the best way(easy).