The Logic of embedding business logic into office documents.

[Michael A Barnhart]

I have recently been asked about the feasibility of custom coding word templates so some buisness operations would be done when the word documents created from these templates were opened or untill that task in the creation of the document was properly started. Given the usage was strictly internal to a company and selective partners, I see no reason why not. However I can not say I see anyone custom coding assemblies (DLL's). Visual Studio Office Tools has been around for a number of years. If this was the best thing since sliced bread I think I would have seen a little usage, but no, nothing. So I have to ask why not?

[Jonathan van de Veen]

I guess most people put code into VBA and use that. Policies block out users from the Macro menu, so they can't edit the code. I've even seen it done in enterprise content management systems. I think it depends also on what you're trying to do.

[Michael P Butler]

Michael A. Barnhart wrote:

Visual Studio Office Tools has been around for a number of years. If this was the best thing since sliced bread I think I would have seen a little usage, but no, nothing. So I have to ask why not?

because the tools used to suck... but the new VSO 2005 is great, especially for Excel work. The Office 12 stuff is supposed to be a lot better. I did a lot of work with Word back when it used WLL (Word Link Libraries), which were basically just C Dlls renamed. This was back in the Word 6 days, after that they abandoned WLL and moved to VBA. The one Office product that most people wanted to customize was Outlook, but it was a nightmare of COM pain to try and write addins.

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