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 …
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