Use Office functionality inside of Visual Studio
Applies to: 
Visual Studio 
Visual Studio for Mac
Note
This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here
When you create a document-level project, the document and the associated application are hosted inside Visual Studio so you can design and work directly with the document. When you have a Microsoft Office application open in Visual Studio, it generally works as expected. However, some of the application's functionality is different or inaccessible.
Applies to: The information in this topic applies to document-level projects for Excel and Word. For more information, see Features available by Office application and project type.
Document protection
Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office Excel offer document protection features that you can use in your projects. However, if document protection is enabled while the document is open in Visual Studio, it can prevent you from making some design changes. For more information, see Document protection in document-level solutions.
Information rights management
Information Rights Management (IRM) is available in Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office Excel. IRM can help you prevent unauthorized people from viewing or altering sensitive information. However, IRM can also prevent your code from running. For more information, see Information rights management and managed code extensions overview.
Password protection
Microsoft Office Word documents and Microsoft Office Excel workbooks can be set so that they cannot be opened by someone who does not know the password. Password protection is handled differently in Word and Excel, and can affect your development process. For more information, see Password protection on Office documents.