I would like to incorporate MS Office into my GIS program. I have been using QGIS and was wondering if this would be possible?
I am trying to create a one stop shop for my staff to be able to write reports and print maps from one program instead of going between programs.
An example would be I have a complete form with blank fields. The fields would be pulled from the map attributes.
That does help, but as the previous answer states - you might not have an easy solution.
Since you mention QGIS I'll assume you don't have ESRI and/or are looking for more FOSS options. You didn't mention any languages so I'll assume you don't want to write your own code if necessary. Those combined assumptions will limit the full functionality of what you want.
If you don't want to mess with code here's the best workaround I can think of:
Assuming also that you want an embedded solution: you could use Spatialite in QGIS (or ESRI 10.2) for visualizing and editing all of your data, and then create an ODBC connection between that database and Excel - once it is in Excel you could do whatever you wanted with it, including queries, etc. This would cover the data part of your request, but would leave out the maps part. [You could feed data back to QGIS via delimited text from Excel, although it would be static. You won't easily be editing the ODBC via Excel.] At a minimum that would provide you a good link between the spatial and tabular data, even if that link lived outside of GIS.
If you wanted to extend that link, you could get simplified basemaps from inside Excel by writing google maps urls from parameters (lat/long/zoom/type) from Excel. If you wanted vector data from your maps instead of just location you could create tiles (there is a QGIS plugin) - assuming it is pushed to a database in a similar format to mbtiles you should be able to query that into Excel via the same ODBC but I haven't tried it.
The other option (if you need dynamic maps and/or dynamic spatial parameters like lat/lng or want to query the data in a spatial way,etc) would be to live inside GIS instead. You could use python in QGIS and have your Office data in true row/column format - although at that point you might consider another technology or one of the paid options in the comments above: those might end up being 'cheaper' relative to building and maintaining a dynamically linked system.
[I'd probably use a variant of leaflet draw with some custom built data fields if I was trying to make the analyst's lives easier - sounds like the workflow is rather straightforward.]
Google Maps URL Parameters: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2660201/what-parameters-should-i-use-in-a-google-maps-url-to-go-to-a-lat-lon
SQLite Drivers: http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/
QGIS And Spatialite: http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/training_manual/databases/spatialite.html
As Mapperz said, there's a difference in the base languages, add-ins for QGIS are written in Python which doesn't have an API for Excel, or office in general. The QGIS program itself is written in C/C++/Python and others. I doubt a request that Microsoft creates a python API is going to be addressed any time soon.
What you can do is export a CSV or DBF from QGIS and then os.system (see this link) to a .net compiled program to do your custom reporting.
Programs can be written in VB or C# and the express versions of these languages will complie to an executable and are free to use for non-commercial applications.
