Month: August 2017

Yesterday we’ve seen an issue installing a Word Add-in when the certificate used in the Add-in is not (yet) trusted:

To solve this, we need to add the server certificate as a trusted authority to the certificate store. In my post Office Development – Fixing Certificate Issue with OpenSSL Certificate I already showed you how to create the certificate. I even announced that I had to add the certificate to the trusted root certificates but, in the end, never did that – resulting in the issue above.

Clean up the installed Add-in

First, let’s clean up the installed Add-in to re-do the installation later on to see if it installs correctly after adding the certificate to the trusted root certificates.

Go back to the File/Options/Trust Center/Trust Center Settings … button and click it

Select the Trusted Catalog Address, click Remove and click OK to close the dialog. You’ll get a message that it will be effective when you close and open Word again.

Close Word to get it done.

Now start the certificate manager:
C:\Windows\System32\certmgr.msc

Select the Trusted Root Certification Authorities node, right click, All Tasks, Import …

Click Next to continue

Select the server certificate from the Add-in folder that you created while generating the certificate. Click Open and add the certificate.

Click Next

And … Finish to complete the certificate installation.

Install the Word Add-in again

Repeating the steps from the previous post, go to File/Options/Trust Center/Trust Center Settings … button and click it.

Add the network share again, don’t forget to check the checkbox. Close the dialogs and if you get this message below, close Word and start it again.

Now go to the Insert Tab and click My Add-ins.

Repeating the sequence that we did in our previous post, go to the Insert tab and click My Add-ins.

From the SHARED FOLDER tab select your Add-in again and click Add. Immediately you see the button at the Home Tab in the Commands Group.

And if you now click the button, the Add-in is now loaded without issues. No more warnings for security issues or incorrectly named certificates. It just runs.

So, what have we learned today

– Make sure your security is in place. Prepare your certificates with the correct names on the certificate and add it to the trusted root certificates.

(Note: most of these issues are originated by creating self signed certificates. When using commercially generated certificates most of these certificates already come from trusted root certificates)

– Cleaning (removing) installed Add-ins is not so trivial as you might expect. We had to remove the Catalog entry, closing Office and reopen Office clears the Add-in. It would be easier if the user interface provided an option to remove the Add-in in an easier manner.

(Note: removing the Add-in from Word Online is even worse. I asked the question on StackOverflow where it was confirmed that there is no easy remove option)

Recap

So far, we installed NodeJS, Git, Yeoman and created a simple Add-in. Next, we tried to install it on Word Online, fixed some security issues, installed it on the Word local client, fixed some more security issues and finally installed it on the local Word client again, this time without issues.

Not much interaction yet between the Add-in and Word but we’ll look at that later.

To be continued …

In my last post Office Development – Running Word Online Add-in I explained how to install your Add-in to use in Word Online. Today we will bring the same Add-in into your local Word client installation, Word 2016:

To do so you first need to start your ‘web server’ again by calling

npm start

from the root of your Add-in folder.

Now you have your ‘web server’ up and running and we need to make this visible for Word. Word is able to ‘see’ Add-ins that are exposed by manifest files in a shared network location or web URL. Today we will use the shared network location to expose the manifest file.

To create a shared network location, you simply create a dedicated folder on your machine:

In this case I just created an extra folder in the Add-in project called addinshare.

Don’t forget to copy the manifest file “my-first-addin-manifest.xml” to the just created folder!

Now create the network share by opening the Explorer. Go to “This PC” and select from the menu/ribbon “Manage”

This will open the Computer Management tool. Browse in the left tree to Computer Management\System Tools\Shared Folders\Shares, select it:

Select Action, New Share:

Go to the folder that you dedicated for your Add-in

Click Next to continue

If you like change the name of the share, and click Next

For now, add All Users have read-only access (you might want to change the access rights later on but for demo purposes pick the default) and click Finish.

Click Finish again to close the dialog and close the Management Tool.

Now back to Word, goto the Trust Center under File, Options, Tab Trust Center, Button “Trust Center Settings …”

On the left side select “Trusted Add-in Catalog” and in the Catalog URL enter the network share from your computer \\<computername>\<sharename> that you just created in the previous steps. Click Add catalog to push it in the list.

When added to the list, check the checkbox Show in Menu to make it available in Word.

Note: Before clicking “Add catalog” it would be a good thing to check in Explorer that your folder spelling of the shared folder is correct and is opened without issues.

Click OK twice to close the dialogs. You may see this as well:

If all went right you should be able to add your Add-in to Word. Close all instances of Word and restart Word.

Go to the Insert Tab, just like you did in Word Online from the previous post and click My Add-ins:

Clicking the My Add-ins button in the ribbon will give you the dialog below if you select the option SHARED FOLDER (notice that Word recognized the share and provided you with this menu option. If the share wasn’t recognized the option for SHARED FOLDER would not appear).

What is up? Didn’t we fix the certificate issue? We had it running in the browser, didn’t we?

Well, yes … but what I forgot was to add the certificate to the list of trusted authorities. For now we can go on, we know it is safe but we need to fix this later on (food for another blogpost ).

Click Yes to confirm, select the MyFirstAddin an click Add.

After closing the dialog by clicking Add a new Ribbon item is added to your Word Home Tab:

Kinda useless information, you are already on the HOME tab … nevertheless, click the “Show Taskpane” button to get started. For me this resulted in:

Sh*t happens so I refreshed the page, to see what happened:

A bit better, but still not right. This time we recognized the “not secure” warning. My own fault, it still needs the trusted authority fix. For now, click More information:

This opens up the option to Go on to the webpage (not recommended). We know it is ok in this case, if the source was unknown you should just back out and close the add-in. In this case we created it, know it is secure so we go on to the website, although it was not recommended. We like to be a little bit stubborn at times and there you have it, it worked:

Quite a journey again, still not flawless but cause by my own doing. We now have the Add-in running in both Word Online and in Word 2016 on your local machine.

In our next step, I’ll add the certificate to the trusted authorities to redo this without issues, hopefully…

To be continued

What we’ve seen so far is that we installed NodeJS, Git, Yeoman and fixed a security issue. All if this to create a basic ‘hello world’ Add-in. I must be honest and admit that running your first VBA add-in was a lot easier and running out of the box with just a few lines of code.

But let’s go on. We did run the Add-in as a website, but not as a real Add-in in the Word client. The instructions explain that the easiest thing to do would be to use Word Online. So here we go:

Open Word Online, go to the Insert Tab

Click the Office Add-ins button

On the top right select “Manage My Add-ins” to upload the Add-in manifest

Click Browse to find the Add-in manifest file

After uploading the manifest, you should see the Show Taskpane button appear in the Commands Group and if you click the button the Task pane appears showing you exactly what you’ve seen in our earlier blogpost:

And there you have it … your first Add-in running in the Word client. Congratulations.

I do have to admit that it didn’t work immediately … I had to upload the manifest more than once to get it to work. At first my icon didn’t appear, the group did but the Task pane didn’t load either after clicking the ‘no icon’-button. Trying again solved it (no clue to why the first attempt failed).

Obviously, the scenario we’ve seen so far won’t work ‘in production’. The Add-in website is currently still running on your local machine at a specific port (3000 in this case) and adding the Add-in using Word Online is not directly the most optimal way to get your Add-in up and running.

Our journey of research is apparently not ready yet. We need to overcome the ‘demo’ instructions and see if we can get it closer to a production ready system. I think my next step would be to find out how to run the Add-in in the Word client running on the desktop. Maybe the next step after that to run it on a Mac.

This all is still just running the Add-in, we haven’t seen any interaction with the documents. No fear, we will get there … I’m sure so keep with me and hang in here.

To be continued …