What’s new for Excel add-ins developers in 2021

We’ve been amazed by the breadth and depth of the solutions our community has built on Excel over the years. When it comes to extending Excel, the Office Add-ins platform makes it easy for you to get your data into the hands of Excel users across Windows, Mac, and on the web. As Tristan Davis mentioned in his blog post on January 27 this year, our team is invested in helping you build your own capabilities into software used by millions of people worldwide.

This year, we’re focused on the following to further enhance your development experience:

Building upon a powerful foundation through the WebView2 Control.
Contextual ribbon tabs and shortcut keys to enhance the user experience of your data.
New APIs like AddFromBase64 to simplify your development.
Enabling users to collaborate with your data in Excel on the web through Microsoft Teams. We’re investing in making the dialog and single sign on APIs work seamlessly in that context and ensuring that your add-ins can be fully deployed.
Improving performance, specifically for custom functions.
Building community–inspired patterns and practices such as the Open in Excel and the share state and run code on doc open patterns. Patterns and Practices is an open-source community program where anyone can jump in and help deliver content and code samples for the Office Add-in developer community.

Partner solutions

In our “What’s new for Excel” Ignite video, we highlighted some of the partners that we’ve engaged with and shared some great demos from the Oracle SmartView team. The following are some of the organizations that are part of our amazing and growing developer community.

In upcoming posts, you’ll hear from your fellow developers like Sheetgo, Vena Solutions, FactSet, SAP, Infor, KPMG, Refinitive, Jedox, and more. They’ll tell you why they’ve invested in building Office Add-ins and highlight tips and tricks that you can use in your own projects.

We’ll kick off the series with this blog from Sheetgo. Quick tip: To see all our partner stories book mark this post as we’ll update this with each blog post.

More development resources

Don’t forget, we also offer resources through the Microsoft 365 Developer program that can help you get started with Office Add-ins. Also, check out our earlier Patterns and Practices blog posts. We’ll keep publishing these community-inspired scenarios like Keyboard shortcuts.

Another great forum for tips and tricks is our monthly add-ins community call. Be sure to add this call invite to your calendar: https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall. The monthly call is held every 2nd Wednesday of the month and puts you directly in touch with engineers, dev writers, and PMs who work on the Office Add-ins platform. You can ask questions through the Teams chat and see demos and hear about the latest features. We hope you will join us for our next community call on March 10th at 8:00 PST.