Excel add-in interaction with other Office365 applications

Question

I'm exploring Office 365 development and I'm trying with Excel add-ins. One thing I'd like to was to interact with other Office applications, like Outlook, OneDrive and Word - from Excel. For example, I'd like to send an email from an Excel table and/or insert the value of a cell in a Word document. After searching the documentation, I couldn't find if this is possible, so I'd appreciate some help. I'm new to Office development. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Add-ins (Office.js) run in separate instances of browsers (controlled by the Office apps). This makes it difficult to pass messages between apps. Browser storage (cookies, localStorage and IndexedDatabase) can't consistently see each other's data/events when in separate instances. Because of this, we had to pass messages through our servers just to communicate between Excel, Word, and PowerPoint on the same device. Microsoft currently does not provide an API to communicate between add-ins in different apps.