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How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013

lucidchart.com

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Re: How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013

#11

Post by bhanks »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #8
bhanks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a diagramming app so it is really more useful to add into a word doc or powerpoint. What use case were you thinking of for Excel?

I wasn't thinking about the LucidChart per say. I was wondering how an Web based-app could be intergrated into Excel such that a user was prompted to login and then import user specific data directly into a Excel spreadsheet range using an REST API.

*per se

I can't speak to Excel integration, but I think people are doing that.

Re: How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013

#13

Post by bhanks »

lallysingh wrote: post #12

If you're going to put up source (or in this case, XML), may I suggest two things? (1) Please indent. (2) Consider syntax highlighting. http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/ will do it for you.

Thanks for the tips. Wordpress was being extremely uncooperative. Wasn't parsing 
 or  properly. I will throw that .js script up on the next release. Thanks!

Re: How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013

#15

Post by oboizt »

bambax wrote: post #14

This whole "tabbed apps for MS Office" business looks interesting -- any tutorial anyone would recommend for getting started?

Microsoft's Development Center has a lot of good information on building apps as well as documentation on all the APIs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/apps

Re: How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013

#16

Post by T-hawk »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #8
bhanks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a diagramming app so it is really more useful to add into a word doc or powerpoint. What use case were you thinking of for Excel?

I wasn't thinking about the LucidChart per say. I was wondering how an Web based-app could be intergrated into Excel such that a user was prompted to login and then import user specific data directly into a Excel spreadsheet range using an REST API.

Excel has had that capability forever. Excel VBA code had access to XmlHttpRequest as soon as Internet Explorer did, at version 5.0. XHR is a COM object that can be invoked from just about anywhere in Microsoftland. I was doing this in Excel way back in 2000.

Nowadays XHR is a bit limited as far as exception handling and other niceties you'd like for API calling. But Excel VBA can access anything through COM interop, such as a more robust C# library using .NET objects like HttpWebRequest.

Excel also has a notion of web queries, to populate a range by making an HTTP request and scraping a table out of the HTML. I think that existed as long ago as Excel 2000 and was brought out to the UI in 2007. It doesn't play well with websites requiring a login or a nontrivial click path, though. I have vague memories of wrestling with this, through the spectacular method of launching an IE window from Excel and relying on the MSHTML layer to share the login cookies between that and Excel!

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