We are thrilled to announce that the Office Add-ins Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code is now generally available! After months of public preview, we’ve gathered invaluable feedback from the community and improved the experience.

What’s new in the Office Add-ins Development Kit

The Dev Kit helps set up your environment, create Office Add-ins, and debug your code in a streamlined experience. For more information, see Create Office Add-in projects using Office Add-ins Development Kit for Visual Studio Code.

In this new version, we enabled entry to the sample gallery from webpages. Now, with a simple click on the sample link, you can navigate directly from the sample webpage to VS Code, create the sample, and try it yourself.

Get started with our MS Learn documentation

Before you create your project, make sure you follow the Prerequisites guidance.

• Download and install Visual Studio Code.
• Node.js (the latest LTS version). Visit the Node.js site to download and install the right version for your operating system. To verify if you’ve already installed these tools, run the commands `node -v` and `npm -v` in your terminal.
• Office connected to a Microsoft 365 subscription. You might qualify for a Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription through the Microsoft 365 Developer Program, see the FAQ for details. Alternatively, you can sign up for a 1-month free trial.

Once you’ve completed the prerequisites, you can go to either Word or Excel Quick start, select “Create an add-in in Visual Studio Code” button, open a sample in Visual Studio Code, and create the add-in project.

• Quick start – Build an Excel task pane add-in
• Quick start – Build a Word task pane add-in

What’s next

Currently, you can create Excel, PowerPoint, and Word add-ins using the Office Add-ins Development Kit. We’re working to provide support for add-ins on other Office applications. Outlook is coming soon!

• Try the Office Add-ins Development Kit and let us know your feedback!
• If you have any issues in development, see troubleshoot development errors or create a GitHub issue and we’ll help you.

Additional resources

• Start Office Add-ins development from Office Dev Center.
• For more information about Office Add-ins, see our official documentation.
• If you’re looking to build experiences for Office Add-ins, we strongly recommend joining the Microsoft Office Add-ins community call.