Add-in Express™
for Microsoft® Office and CodeGear® VCL
True RAD for Office extensions
Being completely based on the Rapid Application Development (RAD) paradigm, Add-in Express VCL essentially speeds up the development of COM add-ins, smart tags and RTD servers in Delphi. For Office extension projects, Add-in Express adds a special RAD module - the main module - that implements all necessary interfaces required by extensibility technologies. The RAD module is a VCL component and a container for other Office-specific components such as command bars, ribbon tabs, their controls and other components. This module centralizes the general logic of the add-in, and allows you to add your own toolbars and ribbon tabs or organize the built-in command bars with a couple of clicks. Its properties, methods and events provide an easy way to specify all types of add-ins, to get access to host application objects and to handle add-in and host events. By using the RAD module you can avoid the necessity to learn about the COM Add-in architecture.
For Smart Tag projects based on Add-in Express, the same RAD approach is used. The smart tag module encapsulates the smart tag library, a container for smart tag components. The smart tag module implements the ISmartTagRecognizer and ISmartTagRecognizer2 interfaces and shares one recognizer for several smart tag components. Using the smart tag module you can create several smart tags inside the smart tag library, specify their properties and add action lists to smart tags. The Excel RTD module centralizes all topics of the RTD Server and allows a developer to handle its events and, what is unique, to pass parameters to topics. The RTD module is a container for RTD topic components, items of the RTD function. The RTD module implements the IRtdServer interface.
Visual designer for Office 2007 Ribbon UI
For Office 2007 COM add-ins, Add-in Express provides several components and a new visual designer targeted to the Office 2007 Ribbon interface. The Ribbon designer is available as an editor of the Controls collection of the RibbonTab component. Using this designer you can customize the ribbon tab in a way more comfortable than creating Ribbon XML. No more manual authoring of XML, just add ribbon controls into ribbon tabs, set their properties and event handlers and you are done.
Add-in Express supports the customization of the Ribbon user interface on all Ribbon-based Office 2007 applications: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. You can create custom ribbon tabs in any context and ribbons published by Office 2007 applications including all Outlook ribbons, the ExcelWorkbook, WordDocument, AccessDatabase and PowerPointPresentation ribbons. The Ribbon UI designer shows and groups ribbon tab controls in a treeview, provides a flexible way to design your ribbon tabs, and performs XML schema-validation on the fly. ADXRibbonTab supports all types of Ribbon controls including regular and button groups; regular, edit, combo and check boxes; buttons and split buttons; labels and dropdown lists; galleries and menus; separators and dialog launchers. All Ribbon controls can be created and customized through the designer. More about customizaton of Office 2007 Fluent Ribbon UI.
Visual designer for Office toolbar
Add-in Express offers you the same way for constructing Office 2000 - 2007 toolbars. It contains special toolbar components with a visual designer for its Controls collection.
Use visual designers instead of coding
You use visual designers and special components for
- Adding your own or customizing existing toolbars, menus, sub-menus and pop-ups for Microsoft Office 2000, 2002 (XP), 2003 and 2007.
- Creating new or customizing existing tabs for the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon UI.
- Tuning the Quick Access Toolbar and the Office Menu for Office 2007.
- Developing custom task panes for Microsoft Office 2007 applications.
- Customizing Microsoft Outlook windows with sub-panes and form regions.
- Creating application-level keyboard shortcuts.
- Adding Outlook option and property pages.
- Intercepting any built-in controls.
- Programming Smart Tag recognizers and their actions.
- Developing Microsoft Excel RTD servers and their topics.
- And a lot of other things that have already been implemented by Add-in Express VCL.
You don't use visual designers only to
To put it differently, Add-in Express implements all things required by the supported technologies, you focus on the application code only.
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