Develop Office Add-ins with Visual Studio
This article describes how to use Visual Studio to develop an Office Add-in. If you've already created your add-in, you can skip ahead to the Develop the add-in using Visual Studio section.
Note
As an alternative to using Visual Studio, you may choose to use the Yeoman generator for Office Add-ins and VS Code to create an Office Add-in. For more information about this choice, see Creating an Office Add-in.
Create the add-in project using Visual Studio
Visual Studio can be used to create Office Add-ins for Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. An Office Add-in project gets created as part of a Visual Studio solution and uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. To create an Office Add-in with Visual Studio, follow instructions in the quick start that corresponds to the add-in you'd like to create.
Visual Studio doesn't support creating Office Add-ins for OneNote or Project. To create Office Add-ins for either of these applications, you'll need to use the Yeoman generator for Office Add-ins, as described in the OneNote quick start or the Project quick start.
Develop the add-in using Visual Studio
Visual Studio creates a basic add-in with limited functionality. You can customize the add-in by editing the manifest, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files in Visual Studio. For a high-level description of the project structure and files in the add-in project that Visual Studio creates, see the Visual Studio guidance within the quick start that you completed to create your add-in.
Tip
Because an Office Add-in is a web application, you'll need at least basic web development skills to customize your add-in. If you're new to JavaScript, we recommend reviewing the Mozilla JavaScript tutorial.
To customize your add-in, you'll need to understand concepts described in the Core concepts > Develop area of this documentation, as well as concepts described in the application-specific area of documentation that corresponds to the add-in you're building (for example, Excel).
Test and debug the add-in
Methods for testing, debugging, and troubleshooting Office Add-ins vary by platform. For more information, see Debug Office Add-ins in Visual Studio and Test and debug Office Add-ins.
Publish the add-in
An Office Add-in consists of a web application and a manifest file. The web application defines the add-in's user interface and functionality, while the manifest specifies the location of the web application and defines settings and capabilities of the add-in.
While you're developing your add-in in Visual Studio, your add-in runs on your local web server (localhost). When your add-in is working as desired and you're ready to publish it for other users to access, you'll need to complete the following steps.
- Deploy the web application to a web server or web hosting service (for example, Microsoft Azure).
- Update the manifest to specify the URL of the deployed application.
- Choose the method you'd like to use to deploy your Office Add-in, and follow the instructions to publish the manifest file.