Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

An Overview of Office Extension Features

Because each Office application has a unique and specialized function, it should come as no surprise that the ways in which you can customize an Office application depend on which Office application we are specifically talking about. Although they all share a common, general layout for their user interface, there are intricacies involved with each of them that dictate different capabilities from within VSTO.

For instance, both Excel and Word deal with files as their central work piece, whereas Outlook deals with emails (which might be stored locally or on a server or both). So we can apply document-level extensions to Excel and Word, but this is not possible in Outlook. Conversely, the Outlook object ...