How to find the manifest of an installed Office Add-In

Today I was not able to test my new developed Office Add-In for Microsoft Excel 2016 on my system and simultaneously on an IIS server.

I noticed the following behavior:

Runing my Office Add-In from Visual Studio – everything went smooth
Runing the same Add-In loaded from my App Store – didn’t work

Office tried to load the Visual Studio ‘version’ from of my Office Add-In instead the App Store and server-based one.

How to get around this issue?

Office saves the app manifests obtained from any app catalog in a sub folder of a GUID named directory here:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef

I was able to locate my app manifest XML in one of these sub folders.

Office did load the manifest pointing to my local IIS instead of the server version. The manifest stored in this folder pointed to local host.

To load my server based version of my app I deleted the folder containing the ‘local’ manifest. Restarting Office was the last step to load the new manifest from the server.

One thought on “How to find the manifest of an installed Office Add-In”

AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Licensing, needs to roam in a citrix terminal server environment, however the path length of Appdata\local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\WEF\GUID\GUID…. is so long it invalids the maximum number of file path characters and causes roaming profiles to freeze loading. Microsoft only support roaming profiles directory not appdata\local, however in shared activation mode for office365 you still need the office\ver\licensing folder keys to roam, otherwise users are asked to activate office every logon.

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Rob says:

19 November 2018 at 13:31

AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Licensing, needs to roam in a citrix terminal server environment, however the path length of Appdata\local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\WEF\GUID\GUID…. is so long it invalids the maximum number of file path characters and causes roaming profiles to freeze loading. Microsoft only support roaming profiles directory not appdata\local, however in shared activation mode for office365 you still need the office\ver\licensing folder keys to roam, otherwise users are asked to activate office every logon.

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