How reliable

Hi Michael,

Word/Excel document customization support has been never removed from VSTO feature set. However, there might be a slight confusion between VSTO 2005 and VSTO 2005 SE feature sets (and next version)

• VSTO 2005 supported document customizations for Word / Excel 2003 as well as managed add-ins for Outlook 2003. This version was shipped with VS 2005 and available as a separate SKU (not free).
• VSTO 2005 SE is a freely downloadable update of VSTO 2005 that includes an updated VSTO Runtime , as well as support for add-ins for multiple applications in Office 2003 and 2007. With VSTO 2005 SE you can run both add-ins and document customizations but the document designers (required to create but not to run customizations) are only available if you had VSTO 2005 before (not free) and only for Word/Excel 2003 (after all, VSTO 2005 target platform was Office 2003).
• The version of VSTO that will be shipped with VS2008 is targeted for Office 2007. As such you get add-ins and Excel/Word document customizations for Office 2007. Updated Office 2003 add-ins support and document designers will also be available so you also get the full experience of VSTO2005 here.

Please read the notes for VSTO 2005 SE download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5e86cab3-6fd6-4955-b979-e1676db6b3cb&displaylang=en

In particular:

* Note that if you install on top of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, no document-level customizations or other functionality that is part of the full version of Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO 2005) is installed. VSTO 2005 SE adds only the application-level features listed in the feature highlights section above.

If you install on top of one of the Visual Studio Team editions or Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office, you will have VSTO 2005 project types available side by side with VSTO 2005 SE projects

DanielMolina-MSFT at 2007-10-2 >