VSTO For Dummies

Chapter 19. Ten Cool Ideas and Resources for Your Next VSTO Project

In This Chapter

• Thinking out of the box for VSTO projects

• Exploring tips and resources for Office development

In this chapter, we share ten interesting ideas and resources you can use for your next VSTO project. Some of the ideas may sound weird, but the whole point of this chapter is to show you that you can accomplish even the craziest feats of technology with VSTO by combining other technologies and APIs. We also include more general tips and resources that make developing with VSTO easier.

The possibilities are practically endless.

Create a Macro to Master the Object Model

Throughout the book, we mention several times that if you want to learn the Office object model, the easiest way is to start poking around and trying different things. But this method of learning the object model may take a while. We have another tip for you how you can learn the object model, and this tip involves macros and recording macros.

We could describe a macro as set of instructions. Office applications contain a so-called Macro recorder, which enables you to record the instructions. Say that you've applied special formatting to some text in the document. You can start recording a macro, perform the formatting steps, and then save the macros and assign it a button or shortcut key. After you save the macro, you can reuse it as much as you like. Instead of executing several steps to achieve a task, you can perform those steps once, save them ...