Action Panes provide a convenient way for developers to inject custom UI into Office applications, saving users the time and effort of launching and copying information between separate applications.
by Laurence Moroney
July 21, 2006
he previous article in this series discussed how to use the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) platform to build a custom alerting application that used Outlook as the alerting engine. The ubiquity and power of the Office platform make this possible; as a developer you can exploit the capabilities already available to users via their Office installations, using Office as an application runtime platform.
Beyond that, you can also drastically improve users' experiences by building applications that mesh neatly with their daily workflow. For example consider an application that a financial analyst might use to research companies—looking at their stock price history, earnings per share, and other financial analytics. Typically, they'll use Excel to manipulate the data. Therefore, building an application that works alongside Excel will usually benefit them more than building a separate application.
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