Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook

14. Working with Document-Level Actions Panes

Introduction to the Document Actions Task Pane

Developing a solution that runs within an Office application provides considerable benefits because you can take advantage of the functionality that already exists in Office. However, it is sometimes hard to design a user interface that meets your needs as most of the user interface space is controlled by the Office application. Office 2003 and VSTO introduced a number of new user interface capabilities, including the ability to use Windows Forms and WPF controls on the document. (See Chapter 13, “Using Windows Forms and WPF in VSTO,” for more information on this capability.)

Placing a control on the document is not always the right paradigm for the user ...