Cross platform Office Add-ins for MacOS and Windows

gagarine
edited December 2, 2019
Hello,

I know really little in Office Add-ins. But the macOS version being slow I started reading the code of it to see why. I was suprise by the number of layers.

I'm wondering if it could be rewritten using the "new" Office JavaScript API and directly communicate with Zotero exposing an HTTP API similar to the Zotero cloud.

This should allow the plugin to work on Word 360 and communicate with Zotero cloud instead of the desktop client with minimal changes. And having the same plugin for macOS and one for Windows.

It also makes sense to avoid using objective-c as Zotero use mostly JS already.

Regards
  • adomasven
    It's certainly possible and quite desirable too. Some progress towards this might happen once we work on Word Online support, but that is not planned in any near future. The old plugins are superior for their support of old versions of Word, but for macOS that is no longer relevant, since anything below Word 2016 no longer works (and cannot be installed), while Word 2016 allows JS extensions.

    Either way, this would require a significant amount of work and effort and the macOS plugin has recently improved in speed by a lot thanks to Word updates which is why this is not being prioritized higher.
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