Every now and then someone asks me “How can I modify the default description that is associated to an add-in I have written and that appears in the Add-In Manager? I tried to modify the Project’s Description attribute, but it didn’t work”.

The answer is simple, even though this detail is not documented in the VB manuals and when I wrote my first add-in I had to load the source code into Notepad to understand what to do.

The description that appears in the Add-In Manager window is actually the Description attribute of the Connect class of the add-in, not of the project. While this might be absurd, it has some logic: theoretically, an add-in project might include several Connect class, each one corresponding to a separate add-in utility (I say theoretically because I don’t see any use in doing that…), therefore the add-in’s description is actually an attribute of the class, not of the project.

Even when I understood what the add-in’s description corresponds to, I had to find out how to modify it from within the Visual Basic environment. While you can modify the description of a property or a method from within the Procedure Attributes dialog invoked from the Tools menu, you can’t do the same for the attribute of a class. To access the proper dialog box you must:

(1) press F2 to show the Object Browser,
(2) right-click on the class name in the left-most pane, and
(3) select the Properties item in the popup menu that appears.