Actions Pane Support The task pane on the right introduced in Office 2003 gave users new context-sensitive help and functionality while working with a document. You could, and still can, program the task pane using the ISmartDocument interface, but now there is an easier way. Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office provides the ActionsPane object, a managed implementation of the Document Actions task pane, which makes creating custom task panes for Word and Excel solutions much easier. The actions pane acts as a container of any Windows Forms controls, including user controls that you create. Typically, you add Windows Forms controls to a user control, and then add the user control to the actions pane. With the actions pane, you can now provide a context-based display of information that is not reliant upon XML element mappings on the document. Because Windows Forms controls are supported, it is now possible to bind the same data source to controls on the actions pane and controls on the document by writing the same .NET data binding code