VSTO versus Office Developers Edition in Older Office

[JimmyC]

I just stumbled across information that I was not previously aware that Visual Studio, or VSTO as it is referred to, replaced the Office Developer Edition in the older officer versions (i.e. Office 97 and 2003). I spent about an hour researching different links,etc. including MSDN. For those VBA gurus, is there a need for VSTO? Are there situations where one would use VSTO and if so, where would it be? I can say that I have never read about a VSTO inquiry in Eileens Lounge only VBA inquires---but perhaps I am looking in the wrong forums, etc. I had heard of Visual Studio before---but not the VSTO acroymn. Thanks for any advice as you can easily discern I am out of my league. JimC

[HansV]

The Office applications use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) as programming language for macros that run within those applications.

Visual Studio is a programming environment that can be used to create stand-alone applications (.exe) and programming libraries (.dll). It provides programming languages such as Visual Basic (note: not Visual Basic for Applications) and C#.

If you want to manipulate Word/Excel/... documents from an application developed in one of the Visual Studio languages, you need an interface that makes the Word/Excel/... objects available. Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is that interface.

So you don't need VSTO if you simply want to create or run macros within Word, Excel etc.
But if you want to create a stand-alone application that manipulates a Word document or Excel workbook, you can use one of the Visual Studio languages in combination with VSTO.

[JimmyC]

Hans---thank you for the clarification and additional knowledge. JimC

[Jay Freedman]

If you have questions about VSTO, you should read and/or post in http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums ... en-US/home" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.