Amit Udeshi

I have read everywhere that Office 2003 is required for VSTO. Well, our users are still on Excel 2002. I successfully installed VSTO 2005 SE, and developed an "Office 2003" add-in for Excel. I replaced the reference to Excel, which was broken, to the Excel 2002 PIA. Everything built, and I could manually load the add-in via COM Add-Ins. This used VSTO's AddinLoader.dll because I could see the path. So it appears the shim was working.

But I am somewhat more interested in document-level customizations. Now, the VSTO install which includes these project types won't even proceed unless I have office 2003 installed, which I don't yet. I was deciding if I should install it and try to hack my way through a solution that can be deployed on 2002.

1. I haven't heard exactly why 2003 is required, and I got a VSTO application level add-in to work on 2002.

2. Are there any ways around the 2003 requirement, even if unsupported

I am only interested in Excel.

Thanks,

Amit




Re: Visual Studio Tools for Office Excel 2002 and VSTO

Cindy Meister

Hi Amit

Office 2003 provides functionality not available in earlier versions, such as the XML capability and the support for SmartDocument technology. VSTO 2005 bases on this to a great extent; if the capability is not present (also the case for Office 2003 Standard), VSTO won't install and can't be used.

The VSTO 2005 SE Add-ins basically just provide a shimmed wrapper for shared COM Add-ins, which explains why you could get an Add-in to work against Office XP.

You won't be able to do that with a VSTO document-level customization. The parts it needs to hook into simply don't exist.