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I have an Office Word add-in that I wish to make it work with Office Word 2016 for Mac. I tried looking into official Microsoft documentation and could not find anything. I want to reuse as much code as possible while still having the extension to work with older versions of Word as well as Office Word 2016.

Is there any way to do this? Any help, even if it is something remotely related to this is appreciated.

Mohamed Shakeel
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TL;DR; There is no way to do that.

Microsoft has bet on a new technology suite also called Office add-ins but web based. They are compatible with Mac. The old COM based approach (on which VSTO .NET add-in are built on) are legacy.

There is no way to reuse .NET code with this new technology, except of course to port business logic to the web server (which serves the web based add-in).

More reading on the comparison with the two add-ins generation: see this article I wrote

Benoit Patra
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I second Benoit's answer. In addition, Not sure how complex is your add-in in terms of interactions with the document content, or if its a service that then inserts or imports data from a backend. Depending on that you will have more reusable code. I would recommend you to do a full analysis on what APIs you need for your add-in to work properly. The new model offers big value with both supporting multiplatform and an easier deployment model. It also provides many rich APIs you can use, however the API depth its still not as rich as VSTO. Our goal is to get there.

I would be curious to understand if there are any gaps on you migration analysis. thx!

Juan Balmori
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  • Is there ServiceWorker support for Office Add-ins so that the add-in can be cached. I want the add-in to run offline. Any way to do that? – Mohamed Shakeel Mar 06 '17 at 08:54
  • At the end of the day your add-in is a web page and it will be available offline if the browser's cache. so if your add-in is a self contained JavaScript it can work offline. – Juan Balmori Mar 07 '17 at 15:46