0

I want customize Word's backstage to add custom templates in "New" tab and not another.
Templates come from a web service. I use Office 2010. Application is develop in C# with Visual Studio 2010.

Is it possible?

Deduplicator
  • 44,692
  • 7
  • 66
  • 118
drapa
  • 1
  • 1

2 Answers2

3

You can add custom templates to the New tab of Word's backstage view by providing an XML manifest, which describes the template and the location of a preview image.

The detailed steps are described here:

Deploy custom templates in the 2007 Office system

Be aware though that this is a rarely used feature and therefore is rather poorly supported. For example, I found the following shortcomings:

  • When opening the folder with the custom templates the first time, the view is empty. The second time you access the backstage view, the templates are shown.
  • Preview and thumbnail images are cached locally. However, I never found a way to update the local cache (the location of the cache is %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\Spotlight\14, replace 14 with whatever your Office version is). When manually deleting the cache, you will also have to delete the following Registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Spotlight\Content\<provider name> (replace 14 with whatever your Office version is).
Dirk Vollmar
  • 172,527
  • 53
  • 255
  • 316
  • Thanks excellent info. Did you delete the cache+registry as a work around to updating the thumbnails? Also I wonder where the cache is located for the user templates. Because in that case there is no "Spotlight" folder. Any idea? – Cilvic Jun 23 '15 at 18:56
  • 1
    @Cilvic: I haven't checked this, but as the mechanism looks like being invented for downloading templates using http, it might be that the _Temporary Internet Files_ folder might be used as the cache? – Dirk Vollmar Jun 24 '15 at 06:22
0

See Word 2013: Templates location and File/New.

The Backstage UI extensibility model doesn't provide anything for templates. You need to place your custom template into presonal temaplates folder and then a user will be able to see them.

Also, as a workaround, you may add a custom tab on the Backstage with your own templates (controls) that come from a web service. You can read more about the Backstage UI in the following articles in MSDN:

Eugene Astafiev
  • 47,483
  • 3
  • 24
  • 45