J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

I Made A Simple Task Pane App

If you've read about Office 2013, you may have seen the terms Content App and Task Pane App. I tried my hand at creating a task pane app,  just to get a feel for how it works.

This task pane can be inserted into a worksheet. It displays my Excel Blogs list, which links to the most recent headlines at each blog. It looks like this:

It's really nothing more than a browser that displays this page. When you click one of the links, the Task Pane displays the recent headlines for that blog as links.  To read an article, click and it opens the article in a browser window. Actually, it's an Internet Explorer browser window. Apparently, task pane apps that have outside links ignore your default browser and always use IE.

This app, of course, offers no advantage over just viewing the site with a browser. Next, I think I'll try to make a flashy date picker app, using HTML5 and Javascript. That one might actually be useful. Documentation is pretty poor at this point, but from what I'm reading, a task pane app can read cells in a worksheet, and write data to cells in a worksheet. That's about it.

Contrary to what's implied in this headline, apps will not replace add-ins: Microsoft Office 2013- Goodbye to adds-in, bring on the apps.