Welcome to the Excel Software Development Kit

Applies to: Excel 2013 | Office 2013 | Visual Studio

Welcome to the Excel 2013 XLL Software Development Kit (SDK) documentation. This reference contains conceptual overviews, programming tasks, and samples to help you develop Microsoft Excel 2013 XLLs.

Revised: November 2012

Download the Excel 2013 XLL SDK.

The Excel 2013 XLL SDK includes the following:

  • C application programming interface (API)—Includes header and source files that enable DLLs to access Excel 2013 functionality, and a description of the interface that a DLL should expose to work with the Excel Add-in Manager.

  • Microsoft Visual Studio projects—Includes C/C++ source code and shows how to use the C API. These sample projects provide examples and they serve as a starting point for your own add-in development.

The SDK documentation contains the following sections:

Functionality Not Covered

The following subjects are not covered:

  • Developing user-defined functions and commands in Excel macro (XLM) sheets.

  • Creating user-defined functions in DLLs that control the flow of execution of an XLM macro.

    Such functions work by returning a special flow control data type, which is also not described in this documentation.

Excel Developer Center

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