Office host applications and their support for add-ins

Host	Shared Add-In	VSTO 2005 SE Add-In
Access 2003	Yes	No
Excel 2003	Yes	Yes
FrontPage 2003	Yes	No
Outlook 2003*	Yes	Yes
PowerPoint 2003	Yes	Yes
Project 2003	Yes	No
Publisher 2003	Yes	No
Visio 2003	Yes	Yes
Word 2003	Yes	Yes
Access 2007	Yes	No
Excel 2007	Yes	Yes
InfoPath 2007	No**	Yes
Outlook 2007	Yes	Yes
PowerPoint 2007	Yes	Yes
Project 2007	Yes	No
Publisher 2007	Yes	No
SharePoint Designer 2007	No**	No
Visio 2007	Yes	Yes
Word 2007	Yes	Yes

* It is also possible to create Outlook 2003 application add-ins with Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office without using VSTO 2005 SE. Thus, there are three ways to create add-ins for Outlook 2003: shared add-ins using COM Interop, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office, and VSTO 2005 SE.

** The Visual Studio 2005 Shared Add-In template does not list InfoPath or SharePoint Designer as supported hosts. However, if you manually create the necessary keys in the registry, both hosts will load shared add-ins created with the template.

Visual Studio Add-ins vs. Shared Add-ins

Types of Add-Ins in Visual Studio

There are two different Add-in project types: Visual Studio and Shared.

A Visual Studio add-in can be loaded into both Visual Studio and the Visual Studio Macros IDE. Conversely, a Shared add-in can be loaded only into Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Visio, and Microsoft Excel. Also, each type offers a different set of options.


For example, the Visual Studio Add-in Wizard allows you to:

• Create a command bar user interface (UI) for your add-in,
• Define when the add-in loads, and
• Insert information into the Visual Studio Help About box.


The Shared Add-in Wizard only allows you to:

• Specify whether the add-in loads when the host application (that is, the Office application) loads, and
• Specify whether the add-in is available to all users of the computer or only the person who installed it.

In short, create Shared add-ins for use in Office applications, and create Visual Studio add-ins for use in Visual Studio.