2. Introduction to Office Solutions

The Three Basic Patterns of Office Solutions

Now that you understand the basic pattern of the Office object models, this chapter explains how developers pattern and build their Office solutions. Most solutions built using Office follow one of three patterns:

• Office automation executable

• Office add-in

• Code behind an Office document

An automation executable is a program separate from Office that controls and automates an Office application. An automation executable can be created with development tools such as Visual Studio. A typical example is a stand-alone console application or Windows Forms application that starts an Office application and then automates it to perform some task. To start a solution ...

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