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Integrating React into Microsoft Office

A guide on how to turn your React app into Microsoft Office add-in

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. are used to solve many everyday tasks. But not everyone knows that these applications can use Add-ins available from Microsoft AppSource. These add-ons allow you to extend the standard Office functionality, such as translating text, searching for images on the Internet, or even scheduling Starbucks appointments. It’s worth noting that many modern add-ins work with Office for iPad, Office Online, and Office for Mac, not just the traditional desktop versions of Office for Windows.

I needed to integrate a widget to work with an existing website I wrote earlier. The main tasks of the add-in can be divided into the following points:

• getting data from an open Microsoft Office document into a widget context;
• analysis of the received data from the current document, highlighting keywords using a simple NLP algorithm (counting the most used words, excluding prepositions and conjunctions), as well as searching for these words and displaying the corresponding content (cards with different types of content: text, images, video, questionnaires, etc.), via the API of an already written server;