neuralSea

re: com addin I eventually used: Implements Extensibility.IDTExtensibility2 with a couple of additions. The VS.NET professional does do a com addin which would have been great knowing about it before I starting registering everything via the command-line using what I gained through an exceptional book on .NET and COM interop.

I've created a COM addin for several office applications (word,excel,ppt) and have put a commandbarbutton into each. Clicking this button calls a form. The form acts as a user interface to the current documents document properties so that the user only need click onto menuitems in several context menu boxes, selected a couple of keywords and they are set as properties (builtin and custom) for that document. The only problem is that I keep getting an object reference not set. I just don't know how to pass the document type detected in the com addin e.g. if typeof (application) is word.application then dim docType as word.document wordApp = CType(application, word.application) excelApp = nothing pptApp = nothing else if ... to the form! The form uses oCustomProperties = docType.BuiltInDocumentProperties etc to get anything usefule done so the addin needs to pass the docType to the form ByVal. I just don't know how to do this. Please help! Eternally indebted, neuralSea