How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013 (opens in new tab)

Thanks for the tips. Wordpress was being extremely uncooperative. Wasn't parsing <pre> or <code> properly. I will throw that .js script up on the next release. Thanks!

It is a diagramming app so it is really more useful to add into a word doc or powerpoint. What use case were you thinking of for Excel?

Excel supports task pane and content apps. So for a task pane app like this, it would be possible to make the same app work in both Word and Excel by modifying the "Capabilities" part o the manifest file. All that needs to be added is the following tag: <Capability Name="Workbook"/>

If the user experience is appropriate, then apps typically work very well in both Word and Excel without any changes to the application code.

Microsoft's Development Center has a lot of good information on building apps as well as documentation on all the APIs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/apps

The Apps for Office API seems to be fairly limited right now to reading from a document and inserting text and images. For insertion, you can only insert data at the cursor point or replace currently selected text. There aren't yet options to move the cursor or insert more advanced document objects. (Although, the Outlook Mail apps are an entirely different story) I think the typical use cases that work well with this API are easier information retrieval while working on a document and inserting images or passages of text.

I was the program manager who worked on the Word APIs. The Javascript APIs were not meant to be a replacement for the power of VBScript. Instead, we optimized design for apps that could be used between various Office products. The only Word-specific APIs are around manipulating CustomXMLParts.