October 30th, 2019

Office Add-in Development Community (PnP) – October 2019 update

The Office Add-ins platform team has new updates to share this month on Office Add-ins Patterns and Practices. We’re excited to announce two new solutions for Office Add-ins PnP released in October 2019!

Integrate an Azure function with your Excel custom function

Diagram showing an Excel custom function that calls over the network to an Azure function and then receives a result.

You can expand the capabilities of Excel custom functions by integrating with Azure functions. An Azure function allows you to move your code to the cloud so it is not visible from the browser, and you can choose additional languages to run in besides JavaScript. An Azure function can integrate with other Azure services such as message queues and storage and you can share the function with other clients.

Dynamic DPI code samples

Diagram of an Office application showing an add-in dragged from one monitor to a another with a different DPI setting.

Many computer and display configurations now support high DPI (dots-per-inch) resolutions, and can connect multiple monitors with different sizes and pixel densities. This requires applications to adjust when the user moves the app to a monitor with a different DPI, or changes the zoom level.

Earlier this year we published an article named Handle high DPI and DPI scaling in your Office solution. The code samples are based on the article to help developers handle DPI scaling with their VSTO, COM and related Office solutions.

Contributors from Microsoft

Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved with the PnP work last month.

  • Shawn McDowell @shawnmcdowell
  • Keyur Patel @keyur32
  • Hidetake Jo
  • David Chesnut @davidchesnut

About Office Add-ins Patterns & Practices (PnP)

Office Add-ins PnP is a Microsoft-led, community driven effort that helps developers extend, build, and provision customizations on the Office platform the right way by providing guidance and help through official documentation and open source initiatives. The source is maintained in GitHub where anyone can participate. You can provide contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation. Office Add-ins PnP is owned and coordinated by Office engineering teams, but the work is done by the community for the community.

You can find code samples for Office Add-in development in the Office Add-ins PnP repo. Some samples are also documented in the Office Add-ins docs, such as Batching custom function calls for a remote service.

SharePoint PnP

Office Add-ins PnP and SharePoint PnP are both related community driven efforts. SharePoint PnP provides community solutions for developers building on SharePoint. For more information about SharePoint PnP, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/community/community

Additional resources

Learn more by joining the monthly Office Add-ins community call.