New Features Boost Office Add-ins

Office Add-ins are a way to extend the functionality of the Office desktop application suite using Web technologies. Office Add-ins can simplify tasks like connecting with business systems, translating text, and looking up information in online reference systems. Recent additions will improve integration with Office features and provide a better deployment model, but support is incomplete on some Office component apps, and adoption of the technology has been slow.

Office Add-ins Benefits

Office Add-ins, formerly known as Apps for Office, are compatible with Office 2013 and 2016, joining the earlier Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) models for extending and customizing Office applications. As with the earlier models, developers can create Office Add-ins that integrate Office with other systems, enabling users to do tasks without leaving an Office application. For example, an Office add-in could provide immediate language translation of a document, or feed the document into a secure signing workflow (an add-in currently offered by DocuSign).