But when we tested the same UI in Word, we discovered that it didn’t serve the application as well. The pop-up editor works wonderfully in that circumstance.
The first was to build a pop-up editor, similar to what we have for the Grammarly browser extension. We had to choose between two different directions. We needed a proof of concept to plan the UX, and we started by building out a few options. Last year, this new API looked stable and mature enough for us to set aside the necessary resources to tackle the project.
That changed when Microsoft introduced the Office add-in API, which is based on JavaScript and works across all devices as well as online in the browser. We didn’t want to start a new project on old tech, but for a while the only option was to build the add-in with Visual Basic Script. Year after year, we’ve been evaluating this project. Here we’ll tell the story of the sometimes rocky road to our much-anticipated add-in for Word on Mac. The path to get there was not always straightforward or direct. There were many roadblocks to making this happen at the quality we expect for all of our offerings-but we were finally able to release Grammarly for Microsoft Word on Mac in beta at the end of 2019, followed by a full release in March 2020.
Mac users have been feeling left out: an add-in for Word on Mac has long been a top requested feature. For more than six years, we’ve supported Grammarly’s add-in for Word and Outlook on Windows.
