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Overview

Bag of words ships a built-in Excel add-in that runs entirely from your own instance. Users can ask BOW questions about their data from inside an Excel taskpane and paste AI-generated results directly into the spreadsheet — with headers, formatting, and borders applied automatically. The add-in works in Excel for Windows, Excel for Mac, and Excel on the web.

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How It Works

Your BOW instance serves the add-in from two endpoints:
EndpointDescription
/excel/manifest.xmlThe Office Add-in manifest, dynamically configured with your instance’s URL
/excel/taskpane.htmlThe add-in UI that loads BOW inside Excel’s task pane
Icon assets are served from /icons/excel/. Because the manifest is generated per-instance, each BOW deployment hosts its own add-in — there’s no central plugin catalog to register with.

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Setup

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1. Download the Manifest

Go to Settings → Integrations → Excel Add-in and click Download manifest.xml.

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2. Upload It in Excel

Open Excel (desktop or web), go to Home → Add-ins → More Add-ins, then click Upload My Add-in and pick the manifest.xml you just downloaded.

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3. Open BOW from the Ribbon

A BOW button appears in the Home tab. Click it to open the taskpane and sign in with your normal BOW credentials.

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Tenant-wide Deployment

For organization-wide rollout, your Microsoft 365 admin can upload the manifest via Admin Center → Settings → Integrated apps — no per-user sideloading needed. Every user in the tenant gets the BOW button in their Excel ribbon automatically.

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What the Add-in Does

  • Opens BOW in Excel’s side panel — the full web app, embedded in the taskpane
  • Sends the current cell selection to BOW for context-aware analysis
  • Pastes AI-generated results into the spreadsheet with headers, formatting, and borders applied automatically
Users can override the BOW URL via the settings gear in the taskpane if they need to point the add-in at a different instance.

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Configuration

The add-in reads base_url from your BOW config (bow-config.yaml) to generate all URLs in the manifest. No additional configuration is needed — deploy and go.