Office (Win) Add-in

Note:

This topic relates to the Office (Win) Add-in. For details on using the Cross-platform MS Office Add-in, see Cross-platform MS Office Add-in.

The CognidoxOffice (Win) Add-in allows you to manage documents stored in your Cognidox repository from within Microsoft Office® applications Excel®, Outlook®, PowerPoint® and Word®.

For example, here's how the Office (Win) Add-in looks in Word:

Being able to access Cognidox this way speeds up document management tasks. It also increases the probability that documents will get added to the repository, which is important for knowledge management and information governance.

Think of the Office (Win) Add-in as a helper application. It helps you to perform some basic tasks, without needing to leave your current Office application. You don't need to open a web browser and go through the usual online procedures.

For example, you can:

  • Browse and search categories and documents on your Cognidox server. See Searching for documents.

  • Open a copy of the latest version of an existing Cognidox document, to make quick edits on your local machine. See Opening documents.

  • Save your local edits to Cognidox as a new version of the currently open document, or upload them to a different document part number.

  • Create a new Cognidox category or document part number.

  • Create a new Cognidox document from an existing template.

  • Clone an existing Cognidox document and edit that copy on your local machine.

  • Upload your local changes directly from Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint as a new draft or issue on your Cognidox server.

  • Compare a previous version of a document with the currently open version on the Cognidox server.

    You can open an old version from the Document History page with a web browser. If you do this you'll be able to compare the currently open version with other versions through the Action tab.

    Note that compare is only available with Word.

    See Comparing documents.

  • Save Outlook email messages and attachments as Cognidox documents.

  • Send Cognidox documents as links or attachments to an Outlook email message.

For anything more complicated than the simple document management tasks outlined above, or to edit anything other than the latest version of a document, you will need to log into your Cognidox server via a web browser in the normal way, as described elsewhere in this online help.

For example, using the Office (Win) Add-in you cannot:

  • Perform document reviews.

  • Approve documents.

  • Compare documents with anything other than the latest version.

  • Access review history or attachments

See the sections on Using Cognidox, Administrators and Product Managers.

  • The Office (Win) Add-in is compatible with all commonly used versions of Microsoft Office, namely Office desktop applications 2010-2019. The Office (Win) Add-in will also work with all current versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 10.

  • If there are differences in a version of Office, this will probably be reflected in the Add-in functionality. For example, Microsoft introduced a feature called working in “Protected View” as new in Word 2010.

  • The Outlook Add-in is compatible with Outlook 2010-2019 running under Microsoft Windows 8 through Windows 10. The Outlook Add-in requires Cognidox 9.0.0 or later. The Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Add-ins work with previous versions of Cognidox, as far back as 8.1.0. It is strongly recommended that the Add-in is used with the most current version of Cognidox.

  • The Office (Win) Add-in requires that the client computer has an installed copy of the Microsoft Office software.

  • The Office (Win) Add-in requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (but that is installed as part of the automated setup).

  • The Office (Win) Add-in is not available for Office for Mac or Office Online versions (use the Cross-platform MS Office Add-in instead).

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