Office Add-in offline installation

Question

Office Add-in offline installation

Johannes Boyne 21

Hi everyone,

Many of our (enterprise) clients have blocked the Microsoft AppSource for their users and would prefer an application installer that does not require loading the add-in via AppSource.
It would be great to also be able to deploy office add-ins written in Type-/JavaScript offline in a packaged way.
Building the add-in in web-technologies is truly great and the Office add-in JS-API is working quite well, thus, a more flexible deployment could expand the reach of such add-ins.

Is there any possibility today to do the above described?

Cheers,
JB

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Eugene Astafiev 891

Your web add-in is hosted on any web server, so you don't need to distribute any files like you did in case of VSTO add-ins. Only the manifest file is required for installing the add-in in Outlook or Office365/Exchange admin center. You may upload it to any web server as well and provide a link to that file to your customers. The Deploy and publish Office Add-ins article describes all possible ways of installing Office add-ins.

As a side note, Office add-ins are cross-platform, do you know any installer which works for all kind of platforms?

Anyway, feature requests on Tech Community are considered, when the dev team go through the planning process. Use the github label: Type: product feature request at https://aka.ms/M365dev-suggestions .

Johannes Boyne 21 Reputation points

2022-10-17T11:01:48.953+00:00

That does not answer the question. Thanks to the documentation it is quite clear how add-ins are distributed usually, the question is, whether there is a potential path as outlined above, where no online connection has to exist.
Eugene Astafiev 891 Reputation points

2022-10-17T12:32:40.273+00:00

There is no potential way to distribute the manifest using an offline installer.
debug 0 Reputation points

2025-10-20T04:03:54.11+00:00

Distributing the manifest is irrelevant to this question.
The question is about finding a way to load a javascript addin to desktop excel.
Today, being unable to load a JS addin to desktop excel is not a technical limitation, since visual studio can sideload a JS addin to desktop excel perfectly fine.
The only reason is simply because MS doesn't want me to.
And before you say that you need to host the files on a web server, web pages can be designed to work offline too.

Share via

Office Add-in offline installation

1 answer

Your answer