Activate Your Word Documents with VSTO

he word processor was invented to simplify the preparation of words to be printed on paper. It offered font management, layout management, and the ability to type words onto a soft screen, changing, formatting, and laying them out as you pleased before committing them to a hard-paper copy by printing them out. Word processing revolutionized many industries, and rapidly became the tool of choice for everybody who needed to write something—not just professional authors and publishers. Microsoft Word, although a relative latecomer to the word-processing application genre, took the industry to a new level by popularizing What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editing—using Windows' graphical display abilities to let users edit documents in a form nearly identical to the final printed form. This capability caused Microsoft Word use to quickly overtake the older fixed-font DOS word processors.

Despite the advancements in presentation, the idea of an editable document remained fixated on the familiar paper format—even though electronic documents are mutable. Even today, we still produce documents as if we are going to print them, with all the trappings of a printed document, such as appendices, page numbers, and static content. Most of us read our documents within our word processors, but forgo the power of the computing platform when using them. That's finally about to change. With Visual Studio Tools for Office you can turn your documents into active applications that can change according to the users' needs.