Feature Requests and Feedback
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Allow dialogs to be sized with pixels instead of only percentages
Office.context.ui.displayDialogAsync gives us the ability to open a dialog of a certain size, but the size options are only in percents of the parents window.
This could be fine if we could know the size of the parent window from an add-in - we could get it and do some calculations, but CORS blocks us from that.
Using only percentages puts us in awkward situations where we have a dialog with a decent amount of content that we need to make responsive to a tiny window when there is still a lot of real estate available in the parent.
73 votes -
Methods for protecting and unprotecting changes in Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents using Office Web API
Need for protecting and unprotecting Word, Excel and PowerPoint content that is open, saved or closed when using the Office Web apps. Using Office Web API there needs to be events that can be caught related to opening, saving and closing these types of files using Office Web apps and content protected or unprotected by password.
72 votes -
Stop using Internet Explorer for the desktop add-ins
Either embed Webkit or use Edge - this has gone on long enough.
72 votes -
Make possible to install Office add-ins permanently to be available offline
I frequently have to keep my computer offline for weeks, and I'd want to use add-ins I need, like ScriptLab of FunctionsTransform, without constantly reminding myself that I must not clear browser cache or trying to self-host them.
Simply put, I need an option to install them permanently on disk instead of memory.70 votes -
Default target framework of Office Addins template should be ASP.NET Core
Currently, the default solution of an Office Addins generates two projects that targets .NET Framework 4.6.x. Microsoft should change it to ASP.NET Core. There is a way to adapt the manifest file as seem in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53991876/change-target-framework-of-a-office-addins-project-from-net-framework-to-net-c/53993432 , but It would be great if the keyword ~remoteAppUrl could refer to another address.
I see this might be a problem as .NET Core is optional when installing VS and might escalate to a broader discusstion.
Also, as asyncronous JavaScript code freaks out migrating VBA (and even web) developers, shouldn't the default template be already in TypeScript (or at least be in the…68 votes -
Solve Office Activation Issues on Azure VMs
Office installed on Azure VMs are losing their activation after a VM shutdown. This makes it impossible to create test VMs or use Office on a developer VM to develop/test/deploy(buildserver output) on Azure. Activation based on hardware assets such as harddrive and network MAC/IP combinations is outdated in 2014 and invalidates your VM images.
65 votesHello,
Thank you for letting us know about this issue. We’re looking into the root cause of this problem and will let you know when we know more.
Thanks,
Office Developer Platform Team -
Add-in Developers - Automated Testing Platform
It is very difficult to test add-ins against multiple versions of Office and on different platforms.
For example, I ran into an issue where I had the latest macOS but a user had an older version. It was very difficult to debug and test code against that older version.
Therefore, it would be nice to have something like https://www.browserstack.com/ or Sauce Labs that was available to Add-in Developers so that we could run some automated testing in CI to make sure our changes will work on multiple platforms and environments. Maybe even at a minimum a set of VM's like…
67 votes -
Give Roadmap for App for Office JavaScript API
I would be very interested to understand where you are going with the JavaScript API. I think it is a very good venue. However, it still is very rudimentary compared to the traditional C# or VBA API’s. There are still fundamental lacks (talking about Excel) such as:
- Get address of bindings (e.g. info compared to =cell() function)
- Get cell formula instead of value from a given matrix binding
- Trigger range based recalculations
- Evaluate function for computing a formula
- Get more context (User context) e.g. for accessing external data (>> rights and roles management)
- And…67 votes -
Extend Word JavaScript API to add the ability to modify style definitions, list templates, and document variables
There should be a way for an Office web add-In to modify existing styles, list templates, and document variables without closing and reopening the document. The JavaScript InsertOoxml method allows you to introduce new styles, list templates, and document variables to the active document but not to modify existing ones. The same was true of the VBA InsertXML method. However, VBA provided easy, direct access to these objects via Document.Styles, Document.ListTemplates, and Document.Variables collections. For example, in VBA, modifying a style was as simple as ActiveDocument.Styles(“NameOfStyle”).Font.Size = #. In contrast, it appears that the only existing objects outside of a…
66 votes -
Add Workbook.CancelEdit or WorkSheet.CancelEdit to get around GeneralExceptionError when cell being edited
It would be great to have a CancelEdit or have the Range Select / setting range values automatically cancel the editing and avoid this error which seems to have no workaround.
Whenever a cell is being edited by the user, any attempt to select a different range or update values in different ranges causes the General Exception error. There is no method to Cancel the Edit (essentially just need to send the ESCAPE keystroke to the workbook).
To reproduced just double-click on a cell to go into edit mode and then execution of this code fails:
Excel.run(function (ctx) {
…//this65 votesHi Brian. Thank you for your input, it is greatly appreciated! We’ve added this to our backlog as something we want to implement. There are many items on the backlog, so we can’t set an exact estimated time for this, but we’ll keep you posted with status updates.
Thanks!
Office Extensibility Team -
Allow to open/save files via JS
It would be very useful to have ability to open file from provided location or to save it there. This way developers could provide better cloud solutions.
Scenarios:
- Open file from or Save file to FileStream
- Open file from os Save file to provided URL (supporting http/ftp even secured)65 votes -
Support Regex (regular expressions) via Search javascript API
context.document.body.search and range.search do not accept regular expressions (regex) as search patterns. The current wildcard language that is supported is far less capable. We have documents with lots of patterns that we look for via regular expressions and currently that is not possible with the javascript API. Please consider adding support for that.
63 votesRon, thanks for your feedback! We’re currently reviewing this suggestion. We’ll get back to you when we have any updates.
Thanks!
Office Extensibility Team -
Support iOS compose in Add-Ins
Currently (05/2017) Outlook for iOS does not support Compose Add-Ins.
Please support iOS and give us some idea of when this support will be available.
62 votes -
Support for high DPI taskpanes
Office now supports high-DPI and per-monitor DPI awareness, but custom task-panes do not. Add-in custom task panes are always hosted in a system aware host window and there is no way to indicate our add-in is high-DPI and multi-monitor DPI aware. Our customers therefore only see a low resolution user interface in the task panes. The Excel built-in task panes support high-DPI so this shouldn't be too difficult, maybe a registry setting indicating the add-in supports high-DPI or even an extra parameter to ICTPFactory.CreateCTP indicating support.
62 votes -
Make the module extension add-in available for Outlook.com (and then hopefully the iOS and Android mobile apps)
Just looking at the new module extension point for Outlook add-ins.
https://dev.office.com/docs/add-ins/outlook/extension-module-outlook-add-ins?product=outlook
I notice that this is only currently available for the desktop version of Outlook
"Note: Module extensions are available only in Office 2016 Click to Run."
It would be great if this extension could be added to the Outlook.com and the mobile apps
61 votes -
Add keyboard shortcut
In all previous versions of MS Word I used ability to assign keyboard shortcut to a macro. However JavaScript API for Office seems to not support this. It is so strange and unexpected.
Unfortunately absence of this feature is a blocker for me to develop custom plugins for Word 2013 online. Could be great to have it back!61 votesRoman, thank you so much for your suggestion! We’re currently reviewing this suggestion to see if we can add it to our backlog. We’ll keep you posted.
Thanks!
Office Extensibility Team -
Allow edits made by Office.js API functions (setDataAsync et. al.) to be 'undone' with Ctrl-z
Right now, an app makes changes to the sheet, there's no way for the user to undo those changes (or their previous changes).
61 votes -
Set Document template and create custom styles programmatically
In Word, allow to set the template of the document and the creation of custom styles using the Word JavaScript API. It is also currently not possible to set page margins via the API. The use case is to create add-ins which convert any user document into a standard form that is consistent with a company standards
59 votes -
Allow PowerPoint Add-in to read custom properties
Current version of API lacks this functionality
59 votes -
Programmatically disable/hide the Ribbon menu
We are in the process of development for Office 365 based Add-ins for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
It would be really nice, if we could have a way to disable/hide the ribbon buttons based on some data against that particular user.59 votesNaveed, thanks for your feedback! We are at the early stages of designing and prototyping this feature. We look forward to sharing the details as soon as we can.
As always, when the design draft is ready, we’ll present it for your review under the open-spec branches in the following repository: https://github.com/officedev/office-js-docs.Thanks!
Office Extensibility Team
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