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How to make Office VBA code interact with a VSTO application-level add-in

Article ID: 977993 - View products that this article applies to.

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INTRODUCTION

This article describes an All-In-One Code Framework sample that is available for download. This code sample includes a step-by-step guide about how to make Office Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) interact with a Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office System (VSTO) add-in.

Note The code sample that is described in this article is not intended to be used in a production environment. It is provided only for illustration. This code sample is released under the terms of the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).

Difficulty level

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Download information

To download this code sample, click the following link:

Technical overview

To access VBA object model from VSTO code, you must reference the Microsoft.Vbe.Interop.dll assembly.

Starting from Office 2003, programmatically access VBA project object model is disabled by default. You must enable this option either manually in Office application settings or programmatically modify a registry value (see VBEHelper.cs):

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\<Office Application>\Security\AccessVBOM

To access the VBA project object model, use the Application.VBE property (see InteropForm.cs).

To get the VBA project associated to a specific Excel Workbook, use the Workbook.VBProject property.

In order to expose your .NET objects to VBA code in Office, you must define the class with the ComVisible attribute and the class must expose the IDispatch interface (see VstoClass.cs). Then, you can override the ThisAddIn.RequestComAddInAutomationService method to return an instance of the class (in this sample VstoClass) to VBA.

On the VBA side, you can get the object that is returned by VSTO via the COMAddIn.Object property.

To call VBA code within VSTO add-in, use the Application.Run method (see InteropForm.cs).

Note For more information about how to create the sample application and how to deploy the sample application, see the Readme.txt file that is included in the download package.

Technology category

Visual Studio Tools for Office

Languages

This code sample contains the following programming languages:

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Language	Project Name
Visual C#	CSVstoVBAInterop
Visual Basic .NET	VBVstoVBAInterop

Prerequisites

Microsoft Office system 2007 or Microsoft Office system 2003
This sample application was created by using Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1 installed.

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MORE INFORMATION

What is All-In-One Code Framework?

All-In-One Code Framework shows most Microsoft development techniques by using code samples in different programming languages. Each example is carefully selected, composed, and documented to show one common code scenario. For more information about All-In-One Code Framework, visit the following Web site:
http://cfx.codeplex.com

(http://cfx.codeplex.com)

How to find more All-In-One Code Framework samples

To find more All-In-One Code Framework samples, you can search for kbcodefx together with related keywords on support.microsoft.com. Or, you can simply click the following link:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?query=kbcodefx

(http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?query=kbcodefx)

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