Overview
Office add-ins are helpful to extend Office applications and deal with Office document contents. Visual Studio has been the popular developer IDE to build the Office add-ins. On the other hand, web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be used to develop Office add-ins platform independently, compared to Visual Studio which supports developers to write their applications on the Windows platform.
In this article, we will explore the Yeoman Generator for Office Add-ins and set up a developer machine for add-in development.
Yeoman Generator for building Office Add-ins
Yeoman is an open-source scaffolding tool to generate projects based on available templates. It also supports creating projects for Office. Yeoman runs through a wizard of questions to scaffold the project. It can be thought of as a replacement for File > New Project experience in Visual Studio. It can be used to create Office add-ins for,
- Word
- Excel
- Excel Custom Functions
- PowerPoint
- Outlook
- OneNote
- Project
Development with Yeoman generator and Visual Studio
We have multiple options to start building our Office Add-ins. Yeoman generator offers more options compared to Visual Studio for development.
Yeoman generator
- Supports development with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We can develop add-ins using famous JavaScript based frameworks and libraries including Angular, React
- Supports TypeScript for writing our code
- Support for creating add-ins for Word, Excel, Excel Custom Functions, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Project
Visual Studio
- Supports development only with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Only supports JavaScript based development option
- Support for creating add-ins for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook
Setup Developer Environment
Follow the below set of commands to get your developer environment ready.
Install Node JS
Install latest LTS version from
here.
If you already have NodeJS installed, check the version
node -v
Install Code Editor
Install any of the below code editors
Install Yeoman and bower
Run the below command (to install globally)
npm install -g yo bower
Install Yeoman Generator for Office Add-ins
Run the below command
npm install -g generator-office
NPM packages Update
Yeoman, Bower, Yeoman Office add-ins Generator gets installed as NPM packages. Use the below commands to check and update them.
To update NPM,
npm i -g npm
To check outdated packages,
npm outdated --global
This command will report packages that need updates. Use the below command to update the reported packages.
npm update -g <package-name>
Summary
Office add-ins offer to extend Office applications. Yeoman Generator for Office Add-ins is useful to develop Office add-ins platform independently as compared to Visual Studio which is Windows platform dependent.
References