My office add-in only works on Windows

[Ossi Niiranen]

Background:

I'm a hobbyist developer, and I've been spending some of my copious free time working on a Word add-in. I got it working nicely on Windows Office 2016, but when I try to side-load it on Office for Mac, it does not work. Even on Mac the web page displays fine, but all Jquery calls to a PHP webservice fail. 

Two questions:

1. Given that the add-in fails on a mac without any error messages, I'm not sure what is wrong. What are the typical problems faced when trying to make a working Windows Office add-in work on a mac?

2. Is there an easy way to debug Office add-ins for Mac? I've tried setting up Vorlon.js as described here (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mim/2016/02/18/vorlonjs-plugin-for-debugging-office-addin/) but I must be daft because I can't get it to work. I can get Vorlon installed and running, but I can't get the Office plug-in to work. I don't know why.

[#2]

AFAIK Office Add-ins for Office in the desktop only work with Office installed on top of Windows...at least it was in that way when Microsoft released Office Add-in model some years ago...but it seems they are cooking some stuff about Add-in support in MAC: http://www.macworld.com/article/3051051/software-productivity/add-ins-are-coming-to-microsoft-office...

[#3]

Juan Carlos,

Thanks. They indeed introduced Office add-in support for Mac recently[1], so it is supposed to be working. As I said, I can even install the add-in and see the html page, but scripts calling a PHP webservice seem to fail but I don't know why.

[1] see e.g., https://dev.office.com/docs/add-ins/word/word-add-ins that refers to Office for Mac

[#4]

Ey Ossi, thanks for the link...let's see if someone from the team can help you...I'm not familiar with the Add-in model for MAC so not sure what can be happening in your case

[#5]

Hello, Kindly let me know if the issue is resolved for you. Because I am also facing the similar issue.

My add in works perfectly fine in Windows10 but when I upload the manifest file under com.microsoft.word/Documents/wef directory in mac os x (I am using EI Captian), I can see the Add-ins in word , and I am able to choose my add-in. My Add-in loads perfectly fine in Mac also and I am able to navigate to home.html and able to execute the custom login functionality.  As part of the app functionality I need to call getFileAsync method. In Mac it fails and it does not show any error or it does not show anything in the logs. I tried to setup Vorlon but when I launch the web app from browser its able to connect to Vorlon (it show the client in dashboard), but when I trigger the app from within the word (by clicking the Add-ins button) Vorlon is not picking the client. Is there an easy way to debug the app, as it works perctly fine in Windows. I need to make sure the office Api's should run properly in mac. 

Please let me know if you have any pointers on this. Thanks.

[#6]

Finally I was able to fix this issue myself. I used Office.FileType.Compressed for getFileAsync method. In mac, Office.FileType.Pdf is not working(but works in windows) and it throws internal error. The compressed one will give the response as docx format.