#Microsoft Expressions Code For How

Mac users have been feeling left out: an add-in for Word on Mac has long been a top requested feature. Unity computer.For more than six years, weвЂ™ve supported GrammarlyвЂ™s add-in for Word and Outlook on Windows. Mercury 5 hp outboard motor for sale. Visual Studio for Mac version 8.8 is available for you to download today.Please visit the main page of Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant for Access on Software Informer. NET 5 and debugging Blazor WebAssembly applications and included several improvements for Xamarin developers, including Xamarin.Forms 5.0 Preview support. Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.8 is available today WeвЂ™ve added support for developing applications with.

A redesigned user interface and powerful new tools for simplifying work, creating great looking documents, and exchanging ideas and information with others.The path to get there was not always straightforward or direct. Drill down into complex objects and data structures.Microsoft Office for Mac natively supports the Open XML file formats for compatibility with Windows-based 2007 Microsoft Office products. Inspect and modify the value of variables and arguments. Evaluate complex expressions in the Watch window. Best-in-class debugging tools allow you to: Set breakpoints, including conditional breakpoints.

The first was to build a pop-up editor, similar to what we have for the Grammarly browser extension. We had to choose between two different directions. Last year, this new API looked stable and mature enough for us to set aside the necessary resources to tackle the project.We needed a proof of concept to plan the UX, and we started by building out a few options. That changed when Microsoft introduced the Office add-in API, which is based on JavaScript and works across all devices as well as online in the browser. We didnвЂ™t want to start a new project on old tech, but for a while the only option was to build the add-in with Visual Basic Script. Building a proof of conceptYear after year, weвЂ™ve been evaluating this project.

People who write in Word are often doing so because theyвЂ™re very familiar and comfortable with that writing tool, so taking them outside of the application to review writing suggestions led to a subpar user experience. Using the pop-up editor means being taken momentarily away from the screen where youвЂ™re writing. But when we tested the same UI in Word, we discovered that it didnвЂ™t serve the application as well.

While Grammarly is running, we can show badges in the navigation bar that update with real-time stats about the document:Here is the ribbon in Word on Mac, where the Grammarly icon is static. GrammarlyвЂ™s add-in for Word on Windows supports this with the COM API, but when using the new JavaScript API for Mac, we unfortunately could only render a static icon.Here is the ribbon in Word on Windows, where the Grammarly icon is dynamic. We wanted to be able to add badging to the Grammarly icon in the ribbon and update the user with the number of alerts in their document. We were able to make GrammarlyвЂ™s writing suggestions appear in the sidebar cleanly and considered this a success.Render Grammarly icon in the navigation bar рџ™ЃThe top bar in Word is called a вЂњribbonвЂќ and is the standard element for navigation across Microsoft products. Render Grammarly suggestions in the sidebar рџЊThis was possible to do using the Office add-in API, which gives applications full control to render content in the sidebar.

Microsoft Expressions Code For How

Get rangeвЂ™s vertical coordinate рџ™ЃFrom a UX perspective, it would be nice to be able to align our suggestions with the corresponding piece of text in the documentвЂ”that way a user would see them directly side by side. Thankfully, the API supports a range.select function and we were able to make this possibleвЂ”another success. This means that we need to move the userвЂ™s cursor to that range of text when they click. Move cursor to range рџЊWhen a user selects a Grammarly suggestion in the sidebar, they should be taken to the corresponding text. For example, search(`?`) will return the first 40 characters in the text.To better illustrate, below is some sample code for how we find ranges.HereвЂ™s the helper function to find a range from the beginning of the text to a certain position:HereвЂ™s the function to find the range given a starting and ending position:HereвЂ™s an example of how to use the findRange function, which returns the text of the range:This workaround gave us the results we needed, but the API design still led us to experience some performance issues (we will discuss these in more detail later on). Our solution was to retrieve paragraphs from the document and then use the search API function with wildcards, a form of simplified regular expressions supported by Word.

On Windows, we are able to add custom underlines that are not applied to the actual document. We typically indicate where GrammarlyвЂ™s suggestions are in the text by underlining the relevant parts of the text. Underline range рџ™ЃProbably the most disappointing limitation we encountered was regarding underlining text. Unfortunately, while the COM API for Word on Windows supports this, the JavaScript add-in API for Mac does notвЂ”and there is no workaround.

So the underlines we might apply to a text to alert users to Grammarly suggestions could inadvertently get saved with the documentвЂ”and nobody wants to have a bunch of saved underlines in what theyвЂ™re writing!With no other option, we decided to avoid underlining and instead try highlighting the corresponding text when the user clicks on a Grammarly suggestion in the sidebar. Microsoft Word is evolving toward no longer relying on save functionalityвЂ”instead the document is being constantly updated in the cloud. But we quickly realized that this would be much too dangerous for users. We can change the formatting of a range of text, but that formatting change will be saved in the document itself, which is not what we want to do for our writing assistant.For a brief moment, we considered adding a toggle in the sidebar for a user to click Remove Underlines or Add Underlines.

Each search is an API call, and each API call is a heavy operation. Performance issues and other caveatsYou may recall from our discussion of the textChanged issue that we are using search several times to retrieve a range of text. Thankfully, the API does allow for this for Word using the range.insertText function. Change the text for a range рџђFinally, for cases in which a suggestion is accepted, there needs to be a way for Grammarly to access the text and update it.

As the API doesnвЂ™t expose a way to know when the document has changed, we need to continually poll the text and check for updates. To handle this we have an internal queue so we can wait until our first call finishes before making another.We have another workaround for performance issues encountered due to polling the text. WeвЂ™ve found that when we are hitting Word with multiple API calls at once, we run into lags of up to 500 milliseconds (and sometimes more). Accessing a range of text takes multiple API calls, and we are often retrieving the range multiple times to perform what the user would think of as a single operation.

Microsoft Expressions For Mac