While preparing for various VSTO and Open Xml related talks I needed to come up with a demo add-in which is handy for all. This is kinda difficult since VSTO solutions are there to automate and integrate your business, and it’s hard to automate everyone’s business. I came up with a handy tool though.
Almost every company I see tries to present a uniform look to the outside world. Uniform use of colors, logos or company and product descriptions. Wouldn’t it be nice if you can store these uniformities inside some back-end system and make them available in the tools where you need them? I thought it would. The result? Document Snippets.
Presenting the Document Snippets add-in for Word. It allows you to store pieces of text inside the back-end of your liking, an Office Server for instance. It is meant for storing texts about your company, products or perhaps addressees which you’d like to have available directly in Word. This is somewhat like the new ‘document building block’ feature you’ll find in Word, but I believe those building blocks are stored inside the document template(dotx) which makes it that much harder to share and maintain the snippets.
A small feature overview then: 1. Store document snippets inside your favorite back-end system. The filesystem and Office Server are available out-of-the-box, or implement your own class. 2. Create snippets including images and content controls. And more features which use Office 2007: 3. Ribbon controls which are synchronized with the UI in the TaskPane. 4. An implementation of IPictureDisp, something you’ll run in to when using RibbonX. |   |