Possibly somebody with further insight might elaborate?

You have to install Visual Studio to use VSTO, which costs 500$-1500$ bucks(US) depending on the version you want.

Unfortunate. So I’m assuming VSTO is strictly for IT departments or users with fat wallets. I’ve never worked in an IT department and have a skinny wallet.

In my experience, office development was always at the bottom of the IT dept’s todo list, and office was so great because with a book/net and some free time, I could do the development myself, and I already had the VBA IDE sitting on my desktop. From a non-IT-Dept employee’s point of view, Seems like their giving the tools to the wrong people.

I’m passing and waiting to see what office 12 can do, hopefully everything VSTO can.

Interesting stuff though, the task pane looks very useful when you can program it easily. And automatically turning a named range to an object is a nice trick.

Access DB connectivity is not that hard already, REST web services are starting to make sense “as is”, Soap/WDSL web services are a complex monster for me though, anything to make them easier would be an improvement.