What's the difference between an MS Office Visual Studio Add-in, Shared Add-in, and Excel 2010 Add-in?

I am using Visual Studio 2010 to create a new add-in for Excel. Ideally I would like it to work with Excel 2011 (Mac), 2010, and 2007.

There are three template options to choose from when I start a new C# proj开发者_开发百科ect.

• (Office) Excel 2010 Add-in

• (Extensibility) Visual Studio Add-in

• (Extensibility) Shared Add-in

What are the differences between these template choices?

Thanks in advance.

From MS. As the name implies, you probably want to use shared add-in.

• Office Excel 2010 Add-in

Creates an application-level add-in for Excel 2007 or Excel 2010. For more information, see Getting Started Programming Application-Level Add-Ins and Excel Solutions.

• (Extensibility) Visual Studio Add-in

Visual Studio Add-ins add functionality to the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Macros environments. For more information, see How to: Create an Add-In.

• (Extensibility) Shared Add-in

Shared Add-ins can add functionality to one or more Microsoft Office applications, as well as to Visual Studio. For more information, see How to: Create an Add-In.

Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0fyc0azh.aspx

#1 and #3 will work for Windows machines, but straight from Geoff Darst of Microsoft's VSTO team, "the .Net Development Platform and Visual Studio Tools For Office are Windows only." You'll have to code in VBA to get functionality across all three versions.

If you want to target just the Windows environment, make sure you target the 2007 version of Excel, as I don't believe solutions developed for Excel 2010 are backward compatible with Excel 2007.