Building Add-ins, Wizards, and Templates

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Many design considerations are for applications that store and display data, which companies often require. Other common applications are those that might not involve data storage but help users do their jobs more efficiently. Add-ins, wizards, and templates fall into that category.

There are two types of add-ins you can create for Microsoft® Office XP applications: Component Object Model (COM) add-ins and application-specific add-ins. COM add-ins take advantage of COM technology and can be designed to work in multiple Office XP applications and in the Microsoft® Visual Basic® Editor. For example, you could create a COM add-in that displays a set of images to be inserted into a Microsoft® Word document, a Microsoft® Excel worksheet, or a Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation. You can build COM add-ins in Visual Basic 5.0 or 6.0, or with Office XP Developer.

Application-specific add-ins, on the other hand, function only in the application in which they were created. For example, you could create an Excel add-in to perform calculations you must have to run repeatedly on different sets of data. Both types of add-ins can be integrated into the users' environment, so they become part of the application.

A wizard is a special type of add-in, and you can create a wizard as either a COM add-in or an application-specific add-in. A wizard walks a user through a process, one step at a time. The Mail Merge Helper in Word is a good example of a wizard that walks a user through a complicated process. Creating a wizard is a good way both to control how users enter information into a document and to speed up the process of formatting the document correctly.

A template forms the basis for a new document and can contain text, graphics, predefined styles, macros, and code. Templates make it easier for users to create common documents in a standardized format. For example, you could create a Word template displaying your company's logo and address, so all correspondence from your company has the same look.

See Also

Which Technologies Should You Use? | Workflow: Technology Backgrounder | Where Should You Store Data?