How to test an office excel add-in with other computer

Question

I'm newly developing office Add-Ins. I was able to create an Excel add-in using visual studio 2019 with Office / SharePoint development workload (JavaScrip APIs). It was possible to test on my own excel desktop when I press the start button in Visual studio, but I need a test on another computer. I'm planning to publicize this app on AppSource and OfficeStore.

Checking Microsoft's documentation and some other questions here at Stackoverflow I understood that the recommended way to test is: SideLoad.

Microsoft's Documentation about testing and debugging office add-ins

Test office Add-ins - StackOverflow

Overall Testing Story for Office Add-ins

On the other hand, when I started on my desktop the WebApp(task pane) was host in the IIS server as localhost. So, I created a shared folder and put the manifest archive that was available in my machine on the path: Office add-in\ExcelWebAddIn1\bin\Release\OfficeAppManifests. Besides that, accessing another computer I set the trust manually and it works. On the other hand, when I accessed the excel> insert>add-in>myadd-ins> down arrow is not possible to keep going with Microsoft's documentation, and the add-in is not there!

If I try file>options>add-ins is not there too!

Sideload Office Add-ins for testing from a network share

Is it necessary to host the web app on a real server or Azure before following these steps? or Is it necessary to publish the solution? Besides that how can I include the manifest in excel?

Answer 1

To test an add-in on a machine that is not the machine where the add-in's web app is running, you cannot use "localhost" in the manifest. The manifest must point to the HTTPS URL of the web app.