Visual Studio 2013 Excel VSTO Add WPF Or Windows Form To Document

Question

I want to know how to add a WPF Form or a Regular Windows Form to an excel Spreadsheet to collect data.

For example, I want a button, when clicked to open a WPF/WF which has a couple of checkboxes, and then I want to pass those values back to the worksheet. How would I do that?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no way to actually embed forms in a worksheet unless you were to wrap it up as an OLE object (yuck). You can however, show a dialog form to collect user input and have your VSTO AddIn populate or gather data from the excel sheet. I have used this approach with ease for cryptography scenarios where sharing sensitive data requires a runtime password.

In case you are not limited to an Excel AddIn, you could also push/pull data from an external instance of Excel. Let me know if any of these scenarios suit you and if you would like help with code.