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227 posts from: Brian Jones

Writing Large Excel Files with the Open XML SDK

(Indexed 2010-06-22):

In my last post, I showed you guys how to use the Open XML SDK to read and parse large Excel files. Today, I am going to show you how to write large Excel files with the Open XML SDK. Like in the case of reading, the Open XML SDK provides two approaches for writing Open XML files: 1. using the DOM, 2. using the SAX-like writing capability. All of my examples on this blog have been around using the Open XML SDK DOM to write Open XML files. The DOM makes it easy because everything is strongly type...(truncated)...

Parsing and Reading Large Excel Files with the Open XML SDK

(Indexed 2010-05-27):

I want to thank you guys for leaving blog post requests. Today's post will focus on one of your requests: parsing and reading large Excel files with the Open XML SDK. The Open XML SDK provides two approaches for parsing Open XML files: 1. using the SDK DOM, 2. using the SAX-like reading/writing capabilities. The SDK DOM makes it easy to query and parse Open XML files due to strongly typed classes. Unfortunately, the DOM approach requires loading entire Open XML parts in memory, which can sometim...(truncated)...

Improvements Made to the Final Open XML SDK 2.0 compared to the December 2009 CTP

(Indexed 2010-05-03):

In a previous post, where I announced the release of the Open XML SDK 2.0, I promised to give you guys a list of improvements and breaking changes made to the SDK compared to the December 2009 CTP. We made a few tweaks to the SDK based on some of the great feedback we received from you guys. The following sections below outline these changes. Autosave for Creating Documents One of the changes we made to the SDK is around supporting autosave for document creation. Back in August 2009 we released ...(truncated)...

Zeyad Rajabis Open XML SDK Blog Map

(Indexed 2010-04-06):

This post will represent the most up-to-date blog map for topics on the Open XML SDK. Open XML SDK Basics Topic Description ...(truncated)...

Announcing the Release of the Open XML SDK 2.0

(Indexed 2010-03-12):

Today, I am really excited to announce the worldwide availability of the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office! The Open XML SDK plays an integral part in creating Office document solutions that work on the client or server. The Open XML SDK allows you to create, consume, and manipulate Open XML files without needing to automate Office client applications. Combining the power of Office Services and the Open XML SDK enables even more scenarios, such as rich server-side document assembly solutions...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK + Office Services: Better Together

(Indexed 2010-02-26):

I am probably starting to sound like a broken record, but I am really excited about the different types of solutions that are possible when combining the Open XML SDK with Office Services. In the past, I showed you how to leverage the Open XML SDK to accomplish three main scenarios: Push data into Open XML files Pull data out of Open XML files Manipulate Open XML files In a previous post, I showed you how to use Word Automation Services to update fields, such as a table of conten...(truncated)...

Office Developer Atlas

(Indexed 2010-02-17):

John Durant just announced a new interactive developer training tool, based on Silverlight, called Office Developer Atlas. This tool is a great starting point for learning how to develop Office solutions. The current version of the tool concentrates on the following: Building solutions with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) Customizing the Ribbon Fluent UI Customizing the Office 2010 Backstage View Let John or I know if you have requests for other modules in the training environment. Zeyad[Ima...(truncated)...

Leveraging the Power of Word Automation Services and the Open XML SDK

(Indexed 2010-02-09):

Have you ever wanted to update page number fields or a table of contents within Word documents on the server? The Open XML SDK provides functionality that allows you to easily add or remove content within a Word document. However, as mentioned in the announcement of the Open XML SDK 2.0, the SDK does not provide runtime application behaviors such as layout and recalculation. In order to recalculate a table of contents you need to run some kind of layout engine in order to properly determine page...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK Code behind the Custom XML Markup Detection Tool

(Indexed 2010-01-27):

Recently on Gray's blog he posted about a scanning tool that can be used to detect custom XML markup in Word Open XML files (*.docx, *.docm, *.dotm, and *.dotx). The tool is built using the Open XML SDK and we wanted to take the opportunity to show you how the solution works in this blog. Solution The scenario we want to support is, given a directory, find all Word Open XML documents that contain custom XML markup (w:customXml elements). In order to accomplish this scenario we will need to t...(truncated)...

Document Assembly: Merging Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Content Together

(Indexed 2010-01-04):

Document assembly seems to be a hot topic these days especially when combined with the power of SharePoint. Today, I want to show you a pretty rich document assembly solution that is able to take multiple Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and merge them all together to form a final Word document. I showed this solution at both PDC and SPC, so I am going to take the opportunity in this blog to discuss some of the details around the solution. If you want to jump straight into the code, feel fre...(truncated)...

Announcing the Release of the December 2009 CTP for the Open XML SDK

(Indexed 2009-12-14):

I'm really happy to announce the 4th CTP for the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office! There were four major improvements we made to the SDK: Full support for the Office 2010 Open XML formats Office 2010 schema and semantic level validation General improvements based on a recent Open XML SDK usability study Open XML SDK tools improvement Full Support for the Office 2010 Open XML Formats With the latest CTP you are able to create, edit, and consume Office generated Open XML formats for either Of...(truncated)...

Extending the Reach of Excel Services with the Open XML SDK

(Indexed 2009-12-03):

Note: Updated post to point to a YouTube video that is shorter than 10 minutes In Brian's last blog he talked about Open XML and Office Services as a one-two punch to complete many types of solutions. I am going to start writing some posts that showcase these two technologies working together. Excel is a great tool for connecting to multiple types of data sources, like databases or XML files. Unfortunately, Excel has no concept of connecting to other types of Office documents, like Word files. ...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK + Word Automation Services Presentation at PDC

(Indexed 2009-11-23):

I just got back from PDC and am excited to share with you guys the presentation, deck, and code samples I showed at my session. I also want to thank everyone who attended my session. Here is my recorded session: [Image] You can find my session deck here: http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/pdc09/ppt/PR09.pptx You can find all my code samples for the demos I showed here: http://zeyadrajabi.members.winisp.net/sourcecode/PDC%2...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK Sessions at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC)

(Indexed 2009-11-10):

I'm pretty excited, next week I'll be at PDC in Los Angeles giving another presentation on the Open XML SDK. I'll be at the conference from Nov 17-19, so if you're at PDC do come by and say hi. Here's the description and time of the session I'll be presenting: Session TitleTime & DateSession CodeDescriptionDocument Assembly and Manipulation on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using Word Automation Services and Open XML11/19/2009 11:30AM @ 408BPR09Come learn about the Open XML SDK, which provides...(truncated)...

Open XML and Office Services

(Indexed 2009-11-03):

If you didn't see the news up on the Word team blog announcing Word Automation Services, and you have any interest in server side conversion of .docx files into .pdf or .xps, you should definitely go take a look: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2009/10/...(truncated)... Capturing Business Processes in Office I see a lot of different types of solutions people build to make their workgroups run more accurately and efficiently. Many of the solutions are created in order to codif...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK Demos Shown at the SharePoint Conference (SPC)

(Indexed 2009-10-22):

First off, I want to thank everyone who attended my two sessions at SPC on developing solutions on top of the Open XML SDK. The sessions were recorded, so as soon as they are published to the web I will send you guys some links. In the meantime, I want to share with you guys some really cool demos and source code I presented at the sessions. Here is a link to all the demos that I showed, plus a bunch more: http://zeyadrajabi.members.winisp.net/sourcecode/Open XML demos.zip This zip file includes...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK Sessions at the SharePoint Conference (SPC)

(Indexed 2009-10-09):

We're just a couple of weeks away before the start of the SharePoint Conference (SPC) being held in Las Vegas. I want to give you guys a heads up that I will be at the conference from Oct 19-22. I'm pretty excited because I will be giving two different presentations on the Open XML SDK at the conference. Here's the description and times of the two sessions I'll be doing: Session TitleTime & DateSession CodeDescriptionSharePoint 2010 Based Document Assembly and Manipulation using Word Automation ...(truncated)...

Finding Open XML Errors with Open XML SDK Validation

(Indexed 2009-09-24):

In a previous post, I gave you an overview of the functionality added to the Open XML SDK 2.0 August 2009 CTP. Today, I want to deep dive into the schema and semantic level validation support within the SDK. Specifically, I am going to show you guys the Open XML SDK code needed to actually validate your Open XML files. If you've played around with manipulating Open XML files there is a good chance at one point in time your resulting document was considered invalid or corrupt by the applications....(truncated)...

Open XML SDK Code Snippets

(Indexed 2009-09-17):

In my previous post, I announced the release of the Open XML SDK August 2009 CTP. Today, I want to announce the release of the Open XML SDK code snippets. This package of code snippets provides over fifty reusable code samples, in both C# and VB.NET, which accomplish many common tasks involving Excel, PowerPoint, or Word documents. Looking back at the architecture diagram for the Open XML SDK 2.0, these code snippets are part of the high level helper functions: [Image]Erika Ehrli provided a quic...(truncated)...

Announcing the Release of the August 2009 CTP for the Open XML SDK

(Indexed 2009-08-27):

I'm really happy to announce the release of the 3rd CTP for the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office! So what did we do in this CTP? Well, there were three main improvements we made to the SDK: Add semantic level validation support Add markup compatibility/extensibility support General improvements based on your feedback Semantic Level Validation Support Let's go back to the Open XML SDK architecture diagram I showed you when we first announced the Open XML SDK: [Image] As mentioned in a previo...(truncated)...

Native Code Open Packaging Convention APIs

(Indexed 2009-08-19):

In my introduction post on the Open XML SDK I mentioned that the SDK is built on top of System.IO.Packaging. System.IO.Packaging is a set of APIs that are part of .NET 3.0, which allow developers to create and manipulate documents based on the Open Package Convention (OPC). Given that Open XML Formats are based on OPC, the SDK uses System.IO.Packaging APIs to open, edit, create, and save Open XML packages. Some of you have left comments on this blog and on the Open XML SDK forum asking about nat...(truncated)...

Adding Repeating Data to PowerPoint

(Indexed 2009-08-14):

In a previous post, I showed you how to create a product catalog in a Word document using the Open XML SDK. I also showed you how to make PowerPoint a reporting application based on data within a database. Today, I am going to show you how to create a product catalog in a PowerPoint deck using the Open XML SDK. One of the key things I am going to show you in this post is how to create repeating data within a table on a slide. If you want to jump straight into the code, feel free to download this...(truncated)...

The Open XML SDK and Fluent UI Extensibility

(Indexed 2009-08-03):

Fluent UI, or the Ribbon, was introduced as part of Office 2007 as a replacement of the previous system of toolbars and menus. The Fluent UI technology, like the Open XML formats, is based on xml, which allows for a much richer extensibility story for developers. In Erika Ehril's blog post she described several tools and resources related to Fluent UI extensibility. I wanted to take this opportunity to extend her post by showing you how the Open XML SDK can be used to extend or actually control ...(truncated)...

Embedding Any File Type, Like PDF, in an Open XML File

(Indexed 2009-07-21):

In my last post, I showed you guys how to embed an Excel spreadsheet within a Word document without the need to invoke an OLE Server. In today's post I am going to show you how to embed any file in an Open XML file. Specifically, I am going to show you how to embed a PDF file into a Word document. Note that this approach requires you to invoke an OLE Server to embed the file into an Open XML file. My post will talk about using version 2 of the SDK. If you just want to jump straight into the code...(truncated)...

Office 2010 Technical Preview

(Indexed 2009-07-15):

This week is really an exciting week for those of us who work on Office. We just released our first public offering of the Office 2010 Technical Preview. Check out the Office 2010 website for articles, videos, and demos related to this Technical Preview. In today's post I am going to talk about, at a very high-level, some of the really cool developer-centric features we are introducing in Office 2010. In the coming months, in addition to Open XML SDK based solution blog posts, we will blog about...(truncated)...

Embedding an Open XML File in another Open XML File

(Indexed 2009-06-30):

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation on the Open XML SDK to a few customers, where I was asked questions on how to embed files within Open XML documents. I thought it would be a good opportunity to devote a couple of posts around this topic. In today's post I am going to show you how to embed an Open XML file in another Open XML file. Specifically, I am going to show you how to embed an Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx) into a Word document (.docx). Next post will cover how to embed other file ty...(truncated)...

Removing Page and Section Breaks from a Word Document

(Indexed 2009-06-15):

In today's post I am going to show you how to remove page and section breaks within a Word document using the Open XML SDK. Removing these two types of breaks is similar, but requires two different approaches. Let's start off by jumping into removing page breaks. My post will talk about using version 2 of the SDK. If you just want to jump straight into the code, feel free to download this solution here. Solution to Remove Page Breaks To remove page breaks in a document we need to take the follow...(truncated)...

Importing SmartArt from PowerPoint to Word

(Indexed 2009-06-04):

In previous posts, I showed you how to import charts from spreadsheets to a Wordprocessing document and how to import tables from Word documents to spreadsheets. Today, I am going to show you how to import SmartArt from a PowerPoint deck into a Word document. Solution To import a SmartArt graphic from a PowerPoint deck to a Word document we need to take the following actions: Create a template in Word that contains a content control that will be us...(truncated)...

Office 2010 and how it can help you build powerful solutions...

(Indexed 2009-06-01):

There will be more details over the coming months on what's coming in Office 2010, and the power it brings to developers. I'm particularly excited to start talking about the ways in which you can combine the power of the rich clients with server side technologies to build solutions that no longer just target a specific individual using a specific application, but instead expand out to the workgroup, and all the content they are leveraging to accomplish their goals.Many developers are already bui...(truncated)...

Breaking Changes in the Open XML SDK v2 April 2009 CTP

(Indexed 2009-05-19):

One of the big changes we made in the Open XML SDK v2 April 2009 CTP was improving the Low Level DOM component to include functionality related to Office 2007 SP2. With this improvement came a difference in how some elements were interpreted as a 1st class property of a parent class/element vs. as a child element. For example, SdtProperties is no longer a property off of the SdtXXX classes, but is rather interpreted as just a child element. Scouring through the different customer feedback channe...(truncated)...

Retrieving Word Content Based on Styles

(Indexed 2009-05-05):

In previous posts, like Importing a Table from Word to Excel, I showed you how to retrieve content within specific content controls. In these posts, content controls were used to add semantic structure to a document, where this structure aided in retrieving and inserting content. What about other types of content? Well, one common request is being able to retrieve content based on styles, where content can be paragraphs, runs, or even tables. In other words, styles, too, can be used to add seman...(truncated)...

Removing Comments from Excel and PowerPoint Files

(Indexed 2009-04-20):

In a previous post, I showed you how to remove comments from a Word file. In today's post, I am going to show you how to accomplish the same scenario, but this time with Excel and PowerPoint files. Excel and PowerPoint have a Document Inspector feature, which is able to remove multiple types of data/content, including comments. This feature works great for client side solutions, but how do you cleanse these files of comments on the server? The Open XML SDK can accomplish these scenarios in just ...(truncated)...

Announcing the Release of the Open XML SDK Version 2 April 2009 CTP

(Indexed 2009-04-08):

I'm really happy to announce the release of the second CTP for version 2 of the Open XML SDK! Back in October 2008 I showed you guys an architecture diagram of the Open XML SDK. Let's take another look at this diagram: [Image] In version 1 of the Open XML SDK we released the Open XML Packaging API, which allows you to create, open and manipulate Open XML files at the package and part level. In the first CTP of version 2 we released the Open XML Low Level DOM and Stream Reading/Writing components...(truncated)...

Importing a Table from WordprocessingML to SpreadsheetML

(Indexed 2009-04-02):

In a previous post, I showed you how to import charts from spreadsheets to a Wordprocessing document. Today, as promised in my last post, I am going to show you how to import a table from a Wordprocessing document into a spreadsheet. Solution To import a table from a Wordprocessing document to a spreadsheet we need to take the following actions: Create a template in Word that contains a content control that will be used to demarcate the region of the table to be imported Open up the Word documen...(truncated)...

Importing Charts from Spreadsheets to Wordprocessing Documents

(Indexed 2009-03-13):

There have been several requests made by people asking how to import a chart from one document type to another document type. In a previous post, I showed you how to push data into a spreadsheet to create a chart. Today, I am going to show you how to import a chart from a spreadsheet to a Word document. Solution To import a chart from a spreadsheet to a Word document we need to take the following actions: Create a template in Word that contains a content control that will be used to demarcate th...(truncated)...

How to Assemble Multiple PowerPoint Decks

(Indexed 2009-03-05):

I just want to let you guys know we are working on some server issues here, which is why some of the previous posts are not showing images or links to source code. This issue will hopefully be resolved soon. In my previous post, I showed you the easy way to assemble multiple Word documents. Today, I am going to show you how to assemble multiple PowerPoint decks together. Solution To merge two decks, a source deck and a destination deck, together we need to take the following actions: Open up the...(truncated)...

How to Copy a Worksheet within a Workbook

(Indexed 2009-02-19):

As promised in my previous post about reusable methods for manipulating WordprocessingML, I mentioned I would write a post on how to copy a worksheet within a workbook. Note that this blog post talks about copying a worksheet within the same package. Perhaps sometime in the future I will write a post on how to export/import worksheets across different workbooks. Solution To copy a worksheet within a workbook we need to take the following actions: Open up the Spreadsheet document via the Open XML...(truncated)...

Reusable Methods for Manipulating Paragraphs in WordprocessingML

(Indexed 2009-02-13):

In a previous post, I showed you guys the easy way to merge multiple Word documents into one final document by taking advantage of altChunks. One issue with using altChunks is in order to view the final merged document you need an application, like Word, that understands altChunks and is able to actually perform the complex merge tasks. What happens if you don't have the luxury of using Word, or any other application that understands altChunks? Well, then you are required to manually merge the d...(truncated)...

Removing Comments from a Wordprocessing Document Programmatically

(Indexed 2009-02-06):

One of the more common scenarios related to a Wordprocessing document is the need to sanitize a document in order to remove personally identifiable information. What do I mean by personally identifiable information? Well, I am talking about, among other things, comments, revisions, personal information such as author name, and hidden text. This type of content may need to be stripped out of a document before the document gets sent outside a corporation. This scenario is so important to Office th...(truncated)...

Traversing in the Open XML DOM

(Indexed 2009-01-28):

For the past few posts, I have been concentrating on showing you guys solutions to real world scenarios. Today, I am going to change pace a bit and continue Ali's discussion on the basics of the Open XML SDK. In this post I am going to cover the basic techniques of traversing in the Open XML DOM tree using the Open XML SDK. Again, it's just XML... We designed the Open XML Low Level DOM to be an XML wrapper of the Open XML schemas. In other words, this component of the SDK allows you to work dire...(truncated)...

Pushing Data from a Database into a Word Document

(Indexed 2009-01-20):

First off I want to thank everyone for leaving comments suggesting future posts about the Open XML SDK. Looking at some of the comments from previous posts, I noticed there were several requests around generating a Wordprocessing document from external data. I have showed you how to accomplish this type of scenario within SpreadsheetML and within PresentationML. Today, I am going to show you how to build a repeating table within WordprocessingML based on data within a database. Scenario Generat...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK... The Basics

(Indexed 2009-01-13):

Hi, my name is Ali and I'm a developer on the Word team. I have been part of the feature team working on the Open XML SDK and in this post I will be digging a little deeper into the SDK and its design concepts. In their many blog posts, Zeyad Rajabi and Eric White demonstrated a number of cool solutions (for example, "Taking Advantage of Bound Content Controls" and "Accepting Track Changes and Removing Comments from a SharePoint Document") one can build by using the Open XML SDK to create, read,...(truncated)...

Taking Advantage of Bound Content Controls

(Indexed 2009-01-06):

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a good holiday. For my first post of the New Year I want to talk about content controls and how this technology provides true data/view separation in Wordprocessing documents. In my previous post, I showed you how to use content controls to provide semantic structure within documents. Today, I am going to show you how to go one step further by leveraging the ability of content controls to bind to custom xml. Scenario Generate Sales Contracts on the Server Ima...(truncated)...

The Easy Way to Assemble Multiple Word Documents

(Indexed 2008-12-08):

One of the most common requests we hear related to word processing documents is the ability to merge multiple documents into a single document. Today, I am going to show you how to leverage altChunks and version 2 of the Open XML SDK to easily create a robust document assembly solution in less than a thirty lines of code. Scenario Document Assembly Imagine a scenario where I'm a developer for a book publisher company that specializes in education based books. In my company, we typically have on...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK Session at PDC

(Indexed 2008-12-02):

I wanted to share with you guys some really cool demos and source code I presented at PDC last month. In addition to some of the same content I have talked about in my previous posts, I showed solutions to other scenarios, including Open XML SDK solutions built on top of SharePoint. I also talked about some of the awesome tools that are available for building solutions on top of Open XML formats. For example, the SDK comes with three very useful tools: Open XML Diff Allows you to compare two Op...(truncated)...

Creating a Presentation Report Based on Data

(Indexed 2008-11-18):

In my last two posts, I showed you how to create a spreadsheet based on data and how to read data from spreadsheet. Today, I am going to move away from SpreadsheetML to talk about PresentationML. Specifically, I am going to show you how to create a rich presentation report based on data from a database. Scenario Document Assembly Imagine a scenario where I'm a developer working for a fictional company called Adventure Works. In my company, we use a database to store all data pertaining to our s...(truncated)...

Writing semantically aware LINQ queries against Excel tables

(Indexed 2008-11-14):

I hope you all have been enjoying Zeyad's articles showing some of the powerful solutions you can build leveraging the Open XML API. Thanks for pulling these all together Zeyad, and I look forward to seeing some of the other solutions we've talked about. Today, there is a new post from Eric White that you should all go take a look at: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive/2008/11/14/using-lin...(truncated)... Eric pulled together a neat prototype where he allows folks to write LINQ queries aga...(truncated)...

Reading Data from SpreadsheetML

(Indexed 2008-11-11):

In my last post, I showed you how to create a spreadsheet based on data from a database using the Open XML SDK. Today I am going to show you how to do the reverse, specifically, how to read data from a spreadsheet and insert it into some data source, like a database. Again, if you have any specific scenarios or solutions you would like me to address in future posts please let me know. Scenario Today's scenario theme is document interrogation, which is all about reading data from a file. Imagine ...(truncated)...

Document Assembly Solution for SpreadsheetML

(Indexed 2008-11-04):

In my last post I gave a high level overview of the architecture of the SDK. Now that we've gone over the basics, we're ready to talk about some real world solutions and end-to-end scenarios. Based on feedback I heard from you guys, I will start with scenarios and solutions around SpreadsheetML. Let me know if you have any specific scenarios or solutions you would like me to address in future posts. In this post, I will show you how to populate a spreadsheet with data from a real SQL database an...(truncated)...

Open XML SDK 2.0 Architecture

(Indexed 2008-10-15):

In my first post on the Open XML SDK, I talked about the overall design of the SDK with respect to goals and scenarios. Today, I am going to talk about the architecture of the SDK in terms of its different components. The SDK Architecture The Open XML SDK is designed and implemented in a layered approach, starting from a base layer moving towards higher level functionality, such as validation. The following diagram illustrates an overview of the Open XML SDK components. [Image]The System Support...(truncated)...

Open XML Format SDK 2.0

(Indexed 2008-10-06):

Hello, my name is Zeyad Rajabi and I am a Program Manager on Brian's team. For the next several posts I will be talking about the Open XML SDK and will show you how to use the SDK to accomplish real world scenarios such as document assembly and document manipulation. Expect to see lots of code samples and demos. In today's post, I am going to talk about the overall design of the Open XML SDK with respect to goals and scenarios. In subsequent posts, I will dive more deeply into the architecture o...(truncated)...

Looking for some good reading on Open XML?

(Indexed 2008-06-30):

Wow, can't believe it's been over a month since my last post. I've been pretty busy getting back into the Office 14 project, the recently released Open XML APIs, as well as the Office 2007 SP work (where we'll be introducing the ODF support). I haven't had as much time to stay on top of the blogosphere, and also haven't been able to write much myself. For folks interested in following along with interoperability and file formats in Office, I would suggest subscribing to Doug Mahugh's blog. He's ...(truncated)...

More on yesterdays ODF announcement

(Indexed 2008-05-22):

Gray Knowlton had a great post yesterday laying out more of the details on the "Save as ODF" functionality that will be built in natively for Office 2007 SP2: http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2008/05/21/mi...(truncated)... though ODF 1.0 is the official ISO version of the format, the decision was made to use version 1.1 which had some accessibility improvements. Hopefully future versions of ODF will be brought back to ISO so that we have a more current ISO version soon. You also ma...(truncated)...

ODF support in Office

(Indexed 2008-05-21):

I took a few weeks off recently, which is why my blog has been fairly inactive the past month. I wanted to take a quick moment to point out some big news that's been in the works for some time now. Today we announced a number of developments in the document formats arena. Doug Mahugh has all the information up on his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/05/21/office-supp...(truncated)... key bit of news that I think many folks will find surprising, but is actually fairly consistent w...(truncated)...

ISO takes full control - SC34 now moving forward on maintenance and evolution of Open XML

(Indexed 2008-04-09):

I'm heading home from Norway in the morning, but wanted to give a quick update on the progress made over the past few days. I was attending the SC34 meetings in Oslo and there was a good amount of focus on document format standards (SC34, as designated by JTC1, is the maintenance body for Open XML). In the meetings, we had some great discussions around the next steps for ISO/IEC IS29500 (Open XML), as well as 26300 (ODF), and the topic of interoperability/harmonization. Today was the day that al...(truncated)...

Open XML Overwhelmingly Approved as an ISO / IEC standard (IS 29500): the end of the file formats war

(Indexed 2008-04-01):

I'm sure many folks have seen the news by now that Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard (IS 29500). Based on the numbers I've seen, looking at the P member countries there are now 24 who vote "yes", and only 8 vote "no". This puts the P member approval at 75% easily passing the 2/3 majority needed. Of the overall votes (both O and P members combined) 61 countries votes "yes" and only 10 voted "no" which puts the overall approval at 86% (so only 14% no). This puts us well below the m...(truncated)...

Open XML Resources for Developers

(Indexed 2008-03-31):

Doug has a great post today that helps get us back to what really matters in this whole file format discussion (at least if you're a developer). He links to a number of existing resources that can help folks who are just now getting started with Open XML development, as well as more advanced links for folks who've already started working with the formats: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/03/31/open-xml-re...(truncated)... many people, I thought we'd know the official outcome of the DIS...(truncated)...

HP in favor of Open XML

(Indexed 2008-03-26):

www.hp.com/go/officedocumentstandards"In the current vote on OOXML at JTC 1, HP is supporting an affirmative vote in those national standards bodies in which HP is active."-Brian[Image]

Can I mention that its also in ODF?

(Indexed 2008-03-25):

I try to keep the discussion on this blog primarily focused on the area I care most about, the technology behind Open XML. Every so often I've mentioned ODF, especially when discussing the translation and harmonization updates, but in terms of discussing the format itself I've assumed that other folks have more interest in it than me, so I've left it to them to discuss. Surprisingly though, many of the ODF folks would rather discuss Open XML than ODF. I haven't seen a lot of vocal pro-ODF blog p...(truncated)...

ODF editor believes Open XML standardization is good for ODF

(Indexed 2008-03-24):

Via Stephen McGibbon: http://notes2self.net/archive/2008/03/24/durusau-quot-opendo...(truncated)... Durusau has posted another thoughtful contribution to the document formats standardisation debate"-Brian[Image]

Out of time

(Indexed 2008-03-21):

I wanted to talk about some of the comments I wish we could have dealt with but we didn't have enough time. We'll need to follow up with the national body for more information, and deal with it in maintenance. Here's the full list if you are interested (http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/group_public/download.php/18...(truncated)... UK Comment #3 : The text frequently uses terms borrowed from other standards but with narrower or in other ways altered meanings. Response: The information provided in t...(truncated)...

Out of time?

(Indexed 2008-03-21):

I wanted to talk about some of the comments I wish we could have dealt with but we didn't have enough time. We'll need to follow up with the national body for more information, and deal with it in maintenance. Here's the full list if you are interested (http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/group_public/download.php/18...(truncated)... but I thought I'd highlight a few: UK Comment #3 : The text frequently uses terms borrowed from other standards but with narrower or in other ways altered meanings. Resp...(truncated)...

Using Open XML to author scientific and technical articles

(Indexed 2008-03-20):

Pablo Fernicola has the news today that we've released a tech preview of an article authoring add-in for word 2007. This add-in leverages the Open XML formats to translate into the XML formats defined by the National Library of Medicine. http://blogs.msdn.com/exscientia/archive/2008/03/20/Technolo...(truncated)... another great example of the power you get when you're able to save into an open xml standard from within Office:OpenXML as the Enabling TechnologyStarting from the OpenXML content sim...(truncated)...

Narrative of the ISO/IEC DIS-29500 BRM Meeting

(Indexed 2008-03-16):

BRM Summary I wanted to take the time to give a narrative of what actually happened in the BRM, since we're now moving onto the final phase and I wanted to get this all in writing before I forgot. I wanted to give an overview of the topics discussed based on the documents that were published last week as well and provide a bit of commentary. While there has been a lot of discussion over the past week or two around the BRM, I think that much of it is misguided. Remember that the BRM wasn't some s...(truncated)...

Interesting Links (March 13 2009)

(Indexed 2008-03-13):

Gray looks into some of the recent thoughts from Patrick Durusau: http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2008/03/12/wi...(truncated)... Accessibility update from Reed, and some news on the activities so far at CSUN: http://blogs.technet.com/reedblog/archive/2008/03/10/microso...(truncated)... Jesper Lund Stocholm discusses his views on why ISO-approval of Open XML is not an option: http://www.idippedut.dk/post/2008/03/Why-ISO-approval-of-OOX...(truncated)... Interesting discussion being ...(truncated)...

Interesting Links (March 13 2008)

(Indexed 2008-03-13):

Object embedding in Open XML

(Indexed 2008-03-10):

There were some concerns raised earlier on that the Open XML format required a specific object embedding to be used (OLE). While it's true that the tag names in the format have "OLE" in them, the embedding is actually generic, and can use other technologies if that's what's desired. I believe (but I'm not positive) that this is also true for ODF's draw:object-ole element.Eric White has a blog post that demonstrates how to embed a KPart on a Linux machine and store that in the Open XML format: ht...(truncated)...

More thoughts on last weeks BRM

(Indexed 2008-03-04):

Here's a bit more information on the results of the BRM last week, and where we go from here. There were about 1,000 comments/issues raised last year with the spec, and starting last fall Ecma began posting responses and proposed changes to the specification to address the concerns. The final batch of responses was posted mid-January, and at that point Ecma had already begun discussions with the national bodies who had raised the comments to see if they were suitably addressed. For the past two ...(truncated)...

BRM is done... time to sleep :-)

(Indexed 2008-02-29):

Well, the BRM is over and I can only describe the week as a lot of technical work and a lot of great people I was lucky enough to meet and exchange ideas with. The objective of the BRM was to work with all of the National Body delegations in the room and improve the specification on a technical level -- and that we did. There were many technical changes the delegates made to really get consensus on some of the more challenging issues, but all of these passed overwhelmingly once they were updated...(truncated)...

Big Interoperability Announcement

(Indexed 2008-02-21):

I'm traveling right now and don't have a lot of time to go really deep on this, but today's interoperability announcement is great for Microsoft for a lot of reasons. Gray Knowlton posted on this today, it's a great read if you want to understand how Office and file formats are affected.Here's an excerpt from Gray's post that is pretty important:"The change should also underscore the idea that support for Open XML is not the same as opposition to other standards, despite many claims to this effe...(truncated)...

British Library now hosting the Office Binary file format specifications

(Indexed 2008-02-21):

For folks excited by the availability of the binary file format specs last week, but concerned about the long term availability of those documents, this should be good news. The British Library has archived, and now made them available to the public: http://www.bl.uk/dp/formats From the website: The British Library has agreed with Microsoft to archive and provide access to the specifications for the Microsoft Office binary file formats. This provides an independent guarantee that people today an...(truncated)...

Binary Documentation (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and Translator Project Site are now live

(Indexed 2008-02-16):

As promised last month, the binary documentation (.doc, .xls, .ppt) is now live. In addition to this, the project to create an open source translator (binary -> Open XML) has now been formed on sourceforge, and the development roadmap has been published. Read my earlier post for more background on this: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/01/16/mapping...(truncated)... Here's an overview of what's now available: Office Binary (doc, xls, ppt) Translator to Open XML The "Office Binary (...(truncated)...

Harmonization: Finding the Differences

(Indexed 2008-02-01):

There have been some discussions over the past several years about the harmonization of Open XML with ODF. In reality the world of formats is clearly much broader than just ODF and Open XML, but given the political climate the focus lately has been specifically on those two formats. As most folks know, the first step towards harmonization is to really gain a true understanding of the differences between the two formats. Last year the German national standard body DIN stood up and took a key driv...(truncated)...

Is it jetlag?

(Indexed 2008-02-01):

I know Rob Weir has been traveling a lot these days lobbying against Open XML across the world, so when I saw this post yesterday I assumed it must be jetlag. I think he completely misunderstood some of the responses from Ecma related to the issue of harmonization, and has missed some significant developments in this area over the past year. I already posted earlier about my thoughts around harmonization, and work that is already under way in the German Standards Body (DIN) to help guide the way...(truncated)...

Links for 1-31-08

(Indexed 2008-01-31):

A few interesting links I wanted to point out:Content Reuse with Open XML and XSLT Alexander Falk (Altova's CEO) has a great post giving examples of how to work with Open XML files using XML Spy:"This is the first article in a series of blog postings that I plan to write about practical Open XML tips & tricks, so I encourage you to subscribe to my XML Aficionado blog (via RSS or via e-mail), if you haven't already done so. This will ensure that you get future articles from this series automatic...(truncated)...

Buzzword now supports reading and writing Open XML

(Indexed 2008-01-30):

We had all the noise last week about IBM supporting Open XML in a number of their products. Today I learned that Adobe's Buzzword, a web based wordprocessor, now supports reading and writing .docx files. Very cool: http://forum.buzzword.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&p=980I think they also have plans on supporting ODF, but it's not clear when that will be available.-Brian[Image]

OASIS ODF committee considering joining DIN to help with translation and interop

(Indexed 2008-01-29):

This is very cool. It looks like the OASIS committee is looking at coming on board to help out with the work going on in DIN to help understand the translation between Open XML and ODF: http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200801/msg00040.htmlThis would be very cool if they either joined or formed a liaison with the group, as it would really help out with interoperability. Here are some of the areas mentioned in the link above where their participation could be helpful:Need for more use-cas...(truncated)...

Links for 1-25-08

(Indexed 2008-01-26):

A few interesting and entertaining links to end the week: IBM's Stance Against OpenXML Is Increasingly Confusing Oliver Bell has a great post where he drills into the history the FUD approach. He also points out how easy it is for a large organization to have trouble with consistent messaging. What every engineer knows Is this Rob's subtle way of telling us that the ODF committee is disappointed that they didn't receive as thorough of a review when they went through ISO as the detailed review ...(truncated)...

Translating OpenXML into DAISY

(Indexed 2008-01-25):

Reed announced today that the first alpha build of the OpenXML to DAISY translator is now available up on SourceForge: http://blogs.technet.com/reedblog/archive/2008/01/25/open-xm...(truncated)... This is awesome. It's another example of the power you get out of translators, and the shared collaboration in building these translators really help folks learn about what if any barriers to interoperability exist so they can be fixed. According to Reed, here's what supported in this first drop: Dubli...(truncated)...

Links 1-23-08

(Indexed 2008-01-23):

A few interesting links out there today: A Closer Look At Those "Single Standard" Policy Mandates Great post from Oliver Bell, as he provides a look at the actual facts in terms of Policy Mandates around file formats. Altova's Alexander Falk Discusses OOXML and ODF Great interview with Alexander Falk, a key figure in the XML community. He discusses some of the questions they get from customers around Open XML and ODF. While you're waiting, don't save in OOXML format in another Fox News style ...(truncated)...

Improvements in Password Hashing

(Indexed 2008-01-23):

There were a number of comments raised by national bodies about the password hashing (encryption) support defined in Open XML. There were some extra hurdles that we had initially put to ensure that we could upgrade an existing binary documents properly. On further discussion in TC45 though, we decided that this extra step should only be necessary with a legacy document where the password hasn't already been entered. For any new document, or any time the password has been verified, we'll now use ...(truncated)...

Google support for Open XML formats

(Indexed 2008-01-18):

I noticed this last week but forgot to blog about it. If you do a google search and the result is an Open XML file (.docx; .xlsx; .pptx) they give you the ability to view them in the browser using their own rendering technology. They support all three formats, and the results are pretty rich (surprisingly richer than what they provide for ODF files). Take a look for yourself. I did a search for .xlsx files: [Image] If you click on the "View as HTML" link, they transform it into HTML and give you...(truncated)...

suppressTopSpacingWP Compat Settings #1

(Indexed 2008-01-18):

I know a lot of people were worried about a subset of the compatibility settings in wordprocessingML that specified the behavior of an older application should be used (such as "suppressTopSpacingWP"). While the vast majority of the settings were fully documented, there were a few that didn't provide enough information. We were torn over what the best approach would be. We could remove them from the spec, but we know that there are files out there (albeit a very small percentage) that use these ...(truncated)...

Add new functionality now or later?

(Indexed 2008-01-18):

One thing we had to think about in TC45 when dealing with the national body comments was how to deal with requests for additional features or functionality. It's important to make sure at this stage to only fix issues in existing functionalities and that you don't put things into a standard that haven't been properly vetted. For example, while I was surprised that ODF didn't have formulas in the first version of their specification even though spreadsheet formulas had already been so widely used...(truncated)...

Mapping documents in the binary format (.doc; .xls; .ppt) to the Open XML format

(Indexed 2008-01-17):

I wanted to call everyone's attention to a few interesting developments in Ecma's proposed disposition document related to the Office binary formats. There were a few comments from national bodies that asked about the documentation of the Office binary formats and the availability of those documents. We had already been talking about these issues in TC45 where there were a number of existing experts in the binary formats (including Apple, Novell, and Microsoft). Based on the feedback from the na...(truncated)...

More info on DAISY and OpenXML

(Indexed 2008-01-17):

Very cool video with the DAISY Consortium's Secretary General George Kerscher discussing DAISY and the project for converting Open XML into DAISY: http://blogs.inquirer.net/techaddicts/2008/01/17/ivdo-daisy-...(truncated)... talked to George a bit about the power of semantics, and how the custom schema support and content controls in the Open XML format really help to shift documents away from the old world of digital typewriters into the new world of rich structured and reusable content.-Brian[...(truncated)...

Responses now complete for all 3,522 comments

(Indexed 2008-01-14):

Yesterday night Ecma TC45 and the Editor of DIS 29500 were able to publish the final drop of our responses to the 3,522 national body comments. The Ecma status report just went live today, and you can access it here: http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/Pro...(truncated)... . Many of the national bodies have already been following along with the progress over the past couple months, as Ecma continued to post the latest responses; and I think they'll all be happy to see the fi...(truncated)...

Gray Knowlton discusses the compatibility pack statistics

(Indexed 2007-12-26):

Gray just recently started blogging and has an interesting post about the number of downloads we've seen to date of the compatibility pack. It's a free update that allow people with older versions of Office to read and write the Open XML formats. There are already over 20 million downloads, and as Gray points out the overall number of folks with the update is even larger than that:The availability of the compatibility pack has been an interesting discussion. Today, the compatibility pack is only...(truncated)...

500+ national body comments posting today

(Indexed 2007-12-21):

Ecma is posting a new status update today. Were in progress updating 500+ new national body comments. As we head into a brief holiday break, were pretty happy about the progress weve made so far. I think the comments this week are the most significant changes weve proposed yet, so I wanted to explain what we did conceptually. At a high level, were responding to feedback that requested simplification for those people who only wanted to implement a subset of the spec. We are also removing from the...(truncated)...

Why all the secrecy?

(Indexed 2007-12-13):

Alex Brown, a long time member of SC34 and the convener of the upcoming BRM for DIS 29500 provided some additional insight into the ISO/IEC rules behind keeping the national body comments confidential. National Bodies submit their comments as part of the fast track process with the understanding that they will be kept confidential, and because of that Ecma TC45 has to be careful about how public it can make the replies: http://adjb.net/index.php?entry=entry071209-141310Ecma SecrecyThere seems to...(truncated)...

Office 2007 SP1 is now available

(Indexed 2007-12-12):

SP1 for Office 2007 is now available for download. One of the interesting fixes we made was based on some problems we found when you tried to use the ODF translator that Sun has built for Office. Malte Timmermann pointed out on his blog back in the summer that there were some major issues when you tried to run their translators on Office 2007: http://blogs.sun.com/malte/entry/more_details_about_sun_sI had some folks look into it a bit, and it turned out there was a bug where we assumed any file ...(truncated)...

Over halfway there including some positive changes to the Open XML standard

(Indexed 2007-12-11):

I had mentioned that the members of Ecma TC45 all met last week in Kyoto to continue working through the national body comments we received as a result of the ISO ballot for Open XML. We've been making a lot of progress over the phone the past couple months (we have 3 hour calls twice a week), but it's always productive to meet face to face and really get through some of the more difficult pieces.Today Ecma has updated the proposed dispositions' portal for the comments that national bodies can g...(truncated)...

IBMs Rob Weir makes it clear he wants war

(Indexed 2007-12-09):

Last spring, we saw some positive developments in the file format world. We started to reach a critical mass of tools that support open formats. There were millions of downloads of the compatibility pack which allowed existing Microsoft Office customer to get full support for Open XML for free. There was a lot of progress in the ODF Open XML translator project which meant that MS Office users could open and save ODF files as well. On the other side you had builds of Open Office that allowed the...(truncated)...

Weird Moment of the Day

(Indexed 2007-12-07):

I saw this blog from one of the current chairs of the ODF committee in OASIS: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/12/bait-and-switch.htmlSo, ODF was adopted as an ISO standard about a year ago, and since then there has already been a new version of ODF (1.1) released by OASIS, and they are supposedly close on version 1.2. I believe 1.2 is supposed to be significant as they've promised it will include a formula definition for spreadsheets (although the working group hasn't seen much activity lately ...(truncated)...

Its hard damned work trying to make this process look so bad

(Indexed 2007-12-04):

Ecma TC45 and the project editor are making great progress in the resolution of comments we received from the national bodies a few months ago. The result will be an even better spec than we had last year, and this really helps highlight the benefits of the standardization process. Of course there are a few folks out there who don't care about actually seeing the spec improve, they just want to see it go away (it's bad for their business plans). So we now have Rob Weir from IBM hard at work tryi...(truncated)...

Standards expert Jan van den Beld now blogging

(Indexed 2007-11-27):

Jan van den Beld, a long time member of the standards community and former Secretary General of Ecma international is now blogging: http://janvandenbeld.blogspot.com/2007/11/starting-my-blog.html I had the privilege of working with Jan last year when we proposed the creation TC45 and then over the next year within TC45 worked with all the other members to create ECMA 376. He was a huge help in getting the group going as some of us had more development experience and not as much standards experie...(truncated)...

Interoperability Track at XML Conference 2007

(Indexed 2007-11-26):

For those of you planning on being in the Boston area next week, you should plan on checking out the XML 2007 conference. There will be a full day Interoperability track that should have a great set of discussions. I'm going to be in Kyoto next week for Ecma and ISO meetings, so unfortunately I won't be able to attend. Craig Kitterman had a post though where he talks about who will be there, and I'm really wishing there was a way I could have made it: We have secured a number of great well-known...(truncated)...

Update on Open XMLs ISO progress

(Indexed 2007-11-20):

I wanted to provide a bit of an update on how things are going in TC45 as we look through the various National Body comments that came in with the Open XML ballot. The ballot resolution meeting (BRM) is going to be the last week of February, and on January 14th the editor of the spec is tasked with pulling together responses to all the issues that were raised. There are 3522 comments in total, but when you group them into similar buckets it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list...(truncated)...

Accessibility of OpenXML

(Indexed 2007-11-14):

Well, I've come back up for air briefly and wanted to quickly point out to folks a really important announcement we made yesterday. We're teaming up with the DAISY consortium to build translation tools that will convert OpenXML documents into the DAISY format (Digital Access Information System). DAISY is a standard already widely in use today that allows people to distribute accessible reading materials. Doug had a post yesterday that gave all the details: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2...(truncated)...

Open XML links for 10-17-2007

(Indexed 2007-10-18):

I'm pretty knee deep in work for the next version of Office, as well as the ISO comments on OpenXML, so my blogging over the next few weeks will be pretty limited. I did want to point out a couple links I came across recently though:Mac OS X Leopard supports multiple file format standards "Mac OS X is now a fully certified UNIX operating system, conforming to both the Single UNIX Specification (SUSv3) and POSIX 1003.1. Deploy Leopard in environments that demand full UNIX conformance and enjoy ex...(truncated)...

New Beta of WordPerfect with Open XML and ODF support

(Indexed 2007-10-04):

Corel just announced the availability of a new beta version of WordPerfect that provides support for both Open XML as well as ODF. They provide for a number of choices in document formats, with Open XML and ODF being the two latest supported formats. http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?nd...(truncated)... is a quote from Nick Davies (VP and GM of graphics and productivity at Corel):"Open standards are increasingly important for our customers, especially in government. A mul...(truncated)...

Links 09-28-2007

(Indexed 2007-09-28):

Well I thought I would have time to work more on the FAQ the past couple weeks, but that was naive of me. I've had zero free time, and had to struggle just to get a few free minutes to pull this post together. Hopefully things will slow down soon. (hAl, thanks for sending me the suggested changes in e-mail, I'll get on it soon)I had a few interesting links I wanted to point out today, some of them are a bit older but I still thought they were good to call out:Jody Goldberg talks about implementi...(truncated)...

Another word-processor supporting Open XML

(Indexed 2007-09-04):

It looks like AbiWord, which is an open source word processing application is now working on Open XML support. http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/OpenXMLImportThey finished up inline formatting about a month ago, and I'm not sure what they are currently working on. So, now we have AbiWord; iWork; OpenOffice; MS Office; Corel; Gnumeric; iPhone; NeoOffice; Palm reader (and a whole host of other applications and tools) supporting the Open XML format. Huge momentum, and we've only just ...(truncated)...

Were getting closer to ISO approval of Open XML!

(Indexed 2007-08-31):

Well, we're almost done with the latest stage in the ISO standardization of Open XML. On Monday, all the national bodies voting on Open XML (I think there are a bit over 100 total!) will submit their current opinion on the Open XML standard. I think that even at this stage we'll probably see that the majority of countries (maybe 60% or so?) will vote "yes". That would be great news, as it gives a lot of momentum going into the final stage which is the ballot resolution meeting. It would also mea...(truncated)...

Ecma meetings in Toronto

(Indexed 2007-08-28):

Well we're in the middle of our last face to face meeting for Ecma TC45 before the ISO vote on September 2. Novell is hosting it up in Toronto, and it's actually given us a chance to meet some of the developers who are integrating Open XML into Open Office. They had initially worked with the XSLTs coming out of the ODF to Open XML translator project, but now it looks like they are building the support in at a more native level without the XSLTs. It was a really cool demo. They showed importing a...(truncated)...

US to vote yes on Open XML

(Indexed 2007-08-24):

Similar to what we just saw from Germany earlier this week, the US has voted to approve Open XML as an ISO standard. The result of the vote for "yes with comments" is posted here: http://ballot.itic.org/itic/tallyvote.taf?function=vote&comm...(truncated)... As I pointed out yesterday, Ecma has already publicly committed to dealing with all comments that have been raised by national bodies, and I've seen some pretty good ones coming in so far. The review that Open XML has undergone during this pr...(truncated)...

Back from Winnipeg

(Indexed 2007-08-23):

I was out for the past week at a family event in Winnipeg. I didn't have any access to e-mail or internet and was pretty surprised to see the number of comments from my post last week. I have to admit I don't think I'll be able to read through and reply to them all, but I'll give it my best.Some people thought the example I gave was too simple. I'll have to work on pulling something more complex together soon. I just grabbed them from Stephen McGibbon's blog. I know that he has some more complex...(truncated)...

Why theres no Microsoft in Open XML

(Indexed 2007-08-15):

Here are a couple cool screenshots from Stephen McGibbon where he shows an OpenXML spreadsheet file created with Gnumeric (runs on Linux & Windows), and the file is then opened up in Numbers (Apple's new spreadsheet app for the Mac).Gnumeric[Image]Numbers[Image]This is pretty cool as it shows how the Open XML formats allow you to communicate across multiple platforms without ever even using Microsoft technology. Of course we hope you still want to use Microsoft technology, but for reasons other ...(truncated)...

A few interesting links

(Indexed 2007-08-10):

Sorry for just posting links the past week or so. I haven't had much time to pull anything new together. Hopefully I'll have some more free time when I get back into the office next week.Can anyone be objective about Open XML?Great blog entry from Kyle McNabb of Forester where he drills into the real motivations behind some of the anti-OpenXML pressures you're seeing out there. He asks folks to see through the motivations of specific companies and form their own opinions. Here's what he says abo...(truncated)...

iWork 08 supports the Open XML formats

(Indexed 2007-08-08):

I talked the other week about how the iPhone supports the Open XML formats. It's pretty incredible to see such a huge uptake in applications that support the format, given that the standard was finalized less than 9 months ago. The traditional applications such as Microsoft Office, Open Office, and even Corel Office either already have support or have announced that they will. Today Apple released iWork '08, which is a suite of three Mac applications called Keynote, Pages and Numbers (similar to...(truncated)...

Going offline for a week

(Indexed 2007-07-20):

I'll be offline for the next week or so. Sorry if I don't answer your e-mails or comments during that time. I'll try to get caught up early August.In the mean time though, check out this article up on eweek: Setting a New StandardAs a user of OpenOffice.org on Linux who works in a mostly Microsoft-formatted world, I'm somewhat of a stakeholder in the ODF-vs.-OOXML horse race, and I'd like to see OpenOffice.org take advantage of this marginal boost in openness. In particular, I'd like to see vend...(truncated)...

Jason Matusow talks about the US vote

(Indexed 2007-07-19):

Jason is on the standards team in Microsoft, and he has a blog post discussing some of the moves to block Open XML at ISO coming from the anti-OpenXML movement (they even set up a 2,500 euro bounty on it):http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2007/07/18/op...(truncated)... wasn't involved in any of the discussions, but to me it's not surprising that you're seeing more people take an interest in Open XML going through ISO. There are already over 1,700 companies who've shown their support for...(truncated)...

iPhone supports Open XML

(Indexed 2007-07-17):

This is pretty cool. I already talked about how there is support for the open xml formats on the palmOS. I was looking into the iPhone today and it looks like it has support not just for .doc, .xls, .pdf, and .html; but also has for .docx and .xlsx. Very cool!I saw this in their product documentation: http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iPhone_User_Guide.pdf[Image]

Open XML news

(Indexed 2007-07-17):

Here are a few interesting links related to the Open XML formatsUS technical committee reaches deadlock Doug talks about how the discussions went in the US technical committee tasked with reviewing the Open XML formats. It sounds like they were just one vote short of getting approval, which means it's now off to the executive board to make the decision. Doug's been working really hard the past few months trying to spread the word on Open XML, and he's now taken a much needed break. I think he'l...(truncated)...

Importing your XML into a spreadsheet

(Indexed 2007-07-16):

I'm going to try to get back on top of all the e-mails folks have been sending me. If you've e-mailed me over the past 6 months the odds are that I didn't reply yet, and I'm sorry about that. I'll start reading through the e-mails again and rather than just replying directly I'll actually try to post it online so that other folks can take advantage of it as well (I'll keep your name and e-mail confidential unless you specify otherwise). Since there is far too much to get through if I look back t...(truncated)...

Spreadsheet formula bugs

(Indexed 2007-07-13):

I saw this blog post from Rob Wier the other day, and I thought it would be worth drilling into a bit more. While Rob tends to have a flare for the dramatics he does point out a couple of good bugs in the formulas piece of the Open XML spec. Rob's actually been spending a ton of time lately pouring through the spec looking for issues and representing those issue on a number of different national standards bodies. I'd like to give Rob the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's doing this in or...(truncated)...

WordprocessingML Document Model

(Indexed 2007-07-11):

I thought it might be worthwhile to give a bit of an overview of the WordprocessingML model that you see in the Open XML standard. There are some people who've played with other formats like HTML or DocBook that are curious why WordprocessingML doesn't use that same model as either of those formats, and there's actually a pretty straightforward reason. If you find this interesting, you might also want to check out the Introduction to Word document post I made last year.WordprocessingML was built...(truncated)...

Open XML timeline

(Indexed 2007-07-10):

I posted on this earlier in the year, but I thought it was worth repeating, as I've seen a number of threads lately that question why Microsoft originally created Open XML rather than going with ODF. As you'll see from the timeline below, both formats were actually developed in parallel, and had very different design goals. 1998 September - Beta version of Office 2000 released with HTML support in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. XML was used for vector markup (VML); metadata; thicket manifest; and ...(truncated)...

Friday links (July 6, 2007)

(Indexed 2007-07-06):

A couple interesting topics I wanted to link to today:Rick Jelliffe makes my week Rick has a great post called "Slashdotters: all together now 'Doh!'" that pretty well sums up my experiences over the past several years. When we first announced the XML formats for Office, there was a focused collection of negative feedback on sites like slashdot, and there were demands that unless we did "foo" it wouldn't really be an open format. Well we've actually done all the things folks asked and then some...(truncated)...

Back from vacation with some good Open XML news

(Indexed 2007-07-02):

Hey folks, sorry for not posting in awhile. I was initially going to be on a two week vacation (starting June 15th), but some stuff came up with work where I had to fly out to Singapore and Japan for the first week of my planned time off. My wife met me out in Tokyo though and we were able to spend much of last week touring around Japan which was great. We were hoping to head down to Okinawa where I'd gone to high school, but we instead stayed on Honshu. While I'm still in vacation mode... I did...(truncated)...

Microsoft Office not dumped by Science and Nature

(Indexed 2007-06-19):

I saw this article today, and wanted to make sure that folks weren't confused about the latest with some of the publishers out there like Science as well as Nature. As I said last week, Murray and I have been talking with them trying to better understand the issues, but the fundamental problem comes down to the fact that these publishers have some very powerful publishing tools they are using that leverage the old binary formats. Those tools do not yet work with the new math functionality in Off...(truncated)...

Open XML in Science and Nature; Deploying Office 2007; and more

(Indexed 2007-06-13):

Here are a few interesting links I came across this week: Open XML in Science and Nature - Murray Sargent gives another update on the discussions we've been having with the folks from Science as well as Nature. They have some really cool publishing processes, and unfortunately we're only now talking to them about how to integrate the new file formats and the new math functionality into their existing process. In the end we should see some pretty cool functionality, but it's still a bit too early...(truncated)...

IBM shows off solutions for OpenXML

(Indexed 2007-06-12):

Stephen was telling me about this article that IBM had written that demonstrated:"consuming and repurposing MS Office 2007 documents is easy with IBM DB2 pureXML features. There really is not much code involved which is conducive to great performance."It sounded pretty cool, as it provided an example .docx file as well as some PHP examples on doing things like repurposing a .docx into a simple HTML paragraph. The article isn't live anymore (looks like it's undergoing some construction), and I th...(truncated)...

HP asks for Open XML approval at ISO

(Indexed 2007-06-11):

The member list over at OpenXMLCommunity.org is definitely growing rapidly. I think they've already more than doubled the number of registered supporters since it started last month.I recently saw this statement from HP about the standardization of Office document formats: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/514506-0-0-0-121....(truncated)... company is in favor of standards for office document formats, including theOffice Open XML (OOXML) and Open Document Format (ODF) standards. We beli...(truncated)...

Altovas XMLSpy supports Open XML

(Indexed 2007-06-08):

Altova's XMLSpy now has rich support for working with the Open XML formats. As they say in their press release: XMLSpy provides powerful support for accessing, editing, transforming, and querying XML data saved in Microsoft Office 2007 documents and other zipped files. Check out this link for more details: http://www.altova.com/features_office_2007.html Navigate parts and relationships: [Image] Directly edit the XML of any part, and get validation and auto-complete: [Image] -Brian[Image]

Wouters updates on the ISO meetings

(Indexed 2007-06-07):

Wouter has been participating in the Dutch ISO standardization meetings where they are looking of Open XML. He has some interesting observations:Talking about the OOXML standardOne thing that really struck me at the meeting was the open statement of the IBM representative of having been given a 'secret agena' for the meeting, I suspect some others to have received the same. The bad thing about this is that the debate no longer covers the merrits of Office Open XML, but instead is targetted by IB...(truncated)...

Passing the OpenXML standard over to ISO

(Indexed 2007-01-19):

I've been reading some pretty wild stuff lately in the blogosphere around OpenXML and its submission to ISO. If all the rumors and misinformation that's out there is to be believed:Microsoft has somehow found a way around the ISO fast track process, so that a vote on Open XML is due any day now Open XML and ODF do the exact same thing (even though the spec for one encompasses about 10 times as much information as the other )While I'd like to believe the former so that I could dedicate a larger p...(truncated)...

Leveraging content in other formats

(Indexed 2007-01-17):

There is a really cool feature that we added into the WordprocessingML format that allows you to pass a file off to a consumer using alternative formats embedded within the WordprocessingML if you know that the consumer supports that alternate format. We had a lot of customers asking for this type of functionality, so we added the alternate content anchors into the WordprocessingML format to help with document assembly scenarios. Scenario I'm building a document generation tool that will allow u...(truncated)...

Specifying the document settings

(Indexed 2007-01-10):

Earlier today I got an e-mail from Max asking if I could help clarify the section of the specification that deals with compatibility settings. Max was reading a blog post from IBM, and was hoping that I could respond with my point of view. Here's the original message from Max: Hi, I read this entry from Rob Weir: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html about specific properties inside Open XML, e.g. "useWord97LineBreakRules". He makes the point how this can be an op...(truncated)...

The power of data-view separation in your documents

(Indexed 2007-01-10):

There is an excellent post over on the Word team blog that goes into details on how the new content controls feature (when parred with XML mapping) allows for powerful data-view separation in you wordprocessing documents. I've talked many times about the custom defined schema support, and this post from Tristan does a great job of explaining how that can be achieved.If you want to see a couple quick demos, a few months back I posted some videos on Channel 9 that helped show what you could do wit...(truncated)...

Open XML support in older versions of Office

(Indexed 2007-01-08):

I was just reading this article in wired (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/software/0,72403-0.htm...(truncated)... and it looks like there is still some misunderstanding about where Open XML is going to be supported. Here is the piece of the article I'm talking about:Significantly, OOXML will not work with older versions of Microsoft Office, which alone could motivate some to upgrade."Microsoft's legacy formats give them a great ramp into whatever next thing they are selling. Even if it's he...(truncated)...

Links - Jan 05 2007

(Indexed 2007-01-06):

Hope everyone had a great first week of 2007. I'm just trying to adjust to being back at work myself. Here are a handful of interesting links from the week:The enchanted officeThis was brought to my attention yesterday. It's a comic meant to show the story of the new Office 2007 user interface. Enjoy. JAhmed Nagy: Office Server Side Scenarios and the new documents formatI've seen this a lot lately, where folks are starting to think about all the user requests they've received over the years to g...(truncated)...

Directions on Microsoft Report on Open XML formats

(Indexed 2007-01-04):

There is a new report out from Directions on Microsoft that discusses the new Open XML formats, and the impact on Office customers. It discusses the benefits that organizations will see from the formats, as well as some deployment recommendations. Here is a link: http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/sample/DOMIS/update/200...(truncated)... liked Rob's overview of the payoffs for Content Management, Public Sector:The most important benefit of the new file formats will be for software developers a...(truncated)...

Using SpreadsheetML to generate rich reports of timesheet data

(Indexed 2007-01-02):

Happy New Year everyone. I hope everyone was able to enjoy the holiday season. I took a couple weeks off in case you were wondering why there weren't any new blog posts. While I took some time off, I did still get a chance to play around with the file formats (I think I have a serious problem with proper use of vacation). We have a small architectural business in the family and I decided to go in and help out with a few of their IT projects. One problem, was that the employees had just been prin...(truncated)...

Links 12.13.2006

(Indexed 2006-12-13):

Some interesting links from the past few days:File FormatsWhy China's UOF is good - O'Reilly XML BlogVery interesting post from Rick Jelliffe about how there are often needs for multiple formats, in order to properly meet the needs of the industry."Standardization is about the consolidation of variety: the reduction of variety is the means not the ends; but the total reduction of variety is not really a necesary means or a worthwhile ends."Open Document Format (ODF) Accessibility EvaluatorCool t...(truncated)...

Whats up with all those rsids?

(Indexed 2006-12-12):

As many folks who worked with the 2003 wordprocessingML format have probably noticed by now, there are is a new set of attributes/elements in the Open XML wordprocessingML format that shows up all over the place. I'm talking about RSIDs. The rsid element is used to allow applications to more effectively merge two documents that have forked. It's best to use an example for explaining the use, so let's image I have a document that has the following text (we'll call this document "Brian1"): Clearly...(truncated)...

Ecma Standard 376 Office Open XML formats

(Indexed 2006-12-08):

It's finally official. Today the Ecma General Assembly voted almost unanimously to approve the Office Open XML formats as an official Ecma standard. They also voted to submit the standard to ISO for fast track certification. The official press release from Ecma International can be found here: http://www.ecma-international.org/news/PressReleases/PR_TC45...(truncated)... Here's a quote from Jan van den Beld, the Secretary General of Ecma International: "The broad spectrum of sponsors from the ind...(truncated)...

More on Ecma Standard 376

(Indexed 2006-12-08):

I wanted to post a few links that were interesting from the news yesterday about Ecma approving the Office Open XML formats as Ecma Standard 276. I'm sure by now most of you have seen all the articles and blogs discussing this big milestone.Clearly this is a great thing for the industry (unless you happen to be one of those folks who had investments in growing this myth that there was some kind of "file format war" underway). We now have an official standard that provides all the details necessa...(truncated)...

Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

(Indexed 2006-12-02):

I wanted to point out a few interesting things that have popped up over the past couple weeks:IDC Report on Open StandardsInteresting study by IDC where they polled companies in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to try and gauge the level of interest in open document standards. As you would imagine, the level of interest in the Open XML formats continues to grow, especially with the standardization vote only a week away and Office 2007 already out the door with full support for the final draf...(truncated)...

Simple SpreadsheetML file (part 2 of 3)

(Indexed 2006-11-16):

This is a continuation on the "Simple SpreadsheetML file Part 1" post I made a couple weeks ago. In that post we created a SpreadsheetML file that consisted of a simple table with 3 columns and 3 rows of data (plus a header row). The table looked like this: Sub TotalTaxTotal14.95 19.95 4.95 Our goal though at the end of this series is to create a table that looks like this: Sub TotalTaxTotal$ 14.95 $ 1.20 $ 16.15 $ 19.95 $ 1.60 $ 21.55 $ 4.95 $ 0.40 $ 5.35 The pieces that we still need to ...(truncated)...

Convert OpenXML files to HTML on sharepoint

(Indexed 2006-11-16):

The sharepoint team recently posted an article up on OpenXMLdeveloper.org on how they allow you to convert files in the Office Open XML format into HTML directly on the server: http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/MOSSconvert.aspxWhen they started investigating this solution, I made sure to point them at the XSLT that we build in Office 2003 to convert the earlier version of WordprocessingML into HTML (http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/09/30/475794.aspx). This article goes into the ...(truncated)...

Week off

(Indexed 2006-11-07):

As I just mentioned in a comment I left in last week's post, I'm actually attempting to take a bit of a break this week. We actually wrapped up the development work on Office 2007 last Friday. It's been a huge release, and it's really exciting to see it finally go out the door. I've been working on these file formats for years now, and it's going to be fun to see this release wrap up. I need a vacation :-) I didn't want to be totally lame though and not blog at all, so here are a few interesting...(truncated)...

Novell and Microsoft teaming up on document interoperability

(Indexed 2006-11-03):

I'm sure by now most folks have read the news on the collaboration agreement between Novell and Microsoft. If not, you can read more up on the Microsoft interoperability site: http://www.microsoft.com/interop (Novell's press release is here) There are a number of really cool pieces to this (Jason Matusow blogged on this yesterday), and one of those directly relates to the Office Open XML file formats. With this announcement Novell has said they will do the development work to allow OpenOffice to...(truncated)...

Simple SpreadsheetML file Part 1 of 3

(Indexed 2006-11-02):

I posted a bunch of "Intro to SpreadsheetML" posts about a year or so ago, but those were all based on the Office XP spreadsheetML format. I think an updated series based on the Open XML standard is long overdue. I'll start off just building a simple table, and in future posts show more about formatting, formulas, and maybe even some charts. Today, we'll start by creating a simple table. Then we'll add a little bit of number formatting and some formulas. In the end, we'll have the following tabl...(truncated)...

Friday thoughts (Oct 27, 2006)

(Indexed 2006-10-27):

I'd been meaning to post a write-up on how to create a simple SpreadsheetML document from scratch, but just haven't had the time this week to pull it all together. Hopefully I'll get that out early next week. I had already done a similar post for WordprocessingML (both for Beta 1 as well as RTM). Here are a couple things I wanted to point out for the week:Arccast interview on Office Open XML - Doug Mahugh and I did a live webcast last month with Ron Jacobs. Ron now has both Part 1 and Part 2 of ...(truncated)...

Performance of an XML file format for spreadsheets

(Indexed 2006-10-26):

I've blogged in the past about some of the things we did with the SpreadsheetML format to help improve the performance of opening and saving those files. While a file format most likely won't affect the performance of an application once the file is loaded, it can significantly impact the performance of the actual load or save. The majority of a wordprocessing file is usually the actual text content and anything you can do to avoid making the storage of that content complex the better. The major...(truncated)...

SpreadsheetML Dates

(Indexed 2006-10-25):

Recently a couple people have questioned the decision to leave the legacy Excel date behavior in the Open XML formats. This was primarily triggered by a post from IBM's Rob Wier. While those folks have referred to it as an Excel bug, it's actually something that was purposely designed into Excel since the beginning. Whenever you work on a feature, you eventually get to a point where you have to make difficult decisions and there are positives and negatives on each side. Let's go though a couple ...(truncated)...

Whitepaper summarizing the Office Open XML standard

(Indexed 2006-10-24):

Ecma has now published a 14 page whitepaper that does an excellent job of describing the Office Open XML standard and the different goals and challenges TC45 had over the past year while working on the spec. I highly recommend everyone interested in office file formats take a look: http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/Ope...(truncated)... Rather than describe the whitepaper in my own words, I figured I'd just leverage the introduction as it does an excellent job of summarizin...(truncated)...

Theyre bringing out the big guns

(Indexed 2006-10-19):

Anyone else been following the latest blog posts from IBM and Sun discussing the Office Open XML formats? It looks like they're stepping up their push to try make ODF the only choice in file formats. I read Tim Bray's post yesterday, but there have actually been a number of other posts folks have pointed out to me as well. Everyone knows that Sun and IBM have a lot riding on ODF financially (they're large corporations, not philanthropies ). It's clear that their plan is to somehow convince gover...(truncated)...

Simple wordprocessingML document (video demo)

(Indexed 2006-10-16):

Are the Office Open XML formats too complex? Not really. They are definitely very rich, but the structure of the formats is pretty simple. As you start to get into more complicated features, the complexity of the formats also kicks in though. To show how simple a basic document is though, I like to use this example wordprocessingML document whenever I give a presentation on the formats. I actually posted this example using Beta 1, but the formats have changed a bit so I though it would be worth ...(truncated)...

Comparison of OpenXML math and MathML

(Indexed 2006-10-13):

Murray Sargent who was the architect of the new math functionality in Office 2007 has a blog post where he talks more about the design of the Math schema in the Office Open XML formats (http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/archive/2006/10/07/MathML-and...(truncated)... Murray has also been active in the MathML community and is even joining the MathML 3.0 working group. I gave some background information on why we made the decision to support MathML, but not to use it in the Office Open XML formats. We ...(truncated)...

Office Open XML final draft!!!

(Indexed 2006-10-09):

As I already mentioned, in the last face to face meeting in Trondheim, Norway we unanimously voted to approve the final draft of the Office Open XML spec as ready to submit to the Ecma General Assembly. The GA will then review the draft and in December there will be a vote to approve it as an Ecma Standard!This is a huge milestone, and the entire technical committee has worked extremely hard over the past year. We really had an amazing collection of contributors to this standard, and if you take...(truncated)...

Random Friday thoughts (from 30,000 feet)

(Indexed 2006-09-29):

Well I'm currently flying over Canada on my way back from Trondheim, Norway and the most recent Ecma face to face meetings hosted by StatOil. I was worried that the wireless internet support wouldn't be available but I guess the connexion service isn't going to stop until the end of the year. It's a bummer they aren't going to keep it going, but at least I can still take advantage of it for this flight (there's something really cool about having the ability to IM with my wife while I'm flying ho...(truncated)...

Interoperability of the Office Open XML formats

(Indexed 2006-09-21):

A comment was posted today that had a lot of thought put into it and rather than just replying to it in the comments stream I thought it would be worth talking to directly. I have to apologize for not replying sooner to it, as it looks like John actually originally posted this a week or so ago (thanks for reposting it John). Here is what John had to say: Sorry for posting twice, but it kinda sunked in your forum ... Hello, Brian, I have been reading your blog nearly since it started. Let me fir...(truncated)...

Over 500 members in the Open XML Developer community

(Indexed 2006-09-20):

There are now well over 500 registered members on the Open XML Developer community site, and from what I've heard there were over 20,000 unique visitors last month alone. I'm not sure if you guys have been out to the site lately, but there are a ton of great discussions going on in the forums, and the sample solutions being posted are really great.The latest article up there covers how to View revisions to a WordprocessingML document in a browser. It shows how you can take advantage of the rich ...(truncated)...

MindManager supports the Office Open XML formats

(Indexed 2006-09-19):

Here's another application that is able to take advantage of the Office Open XML formats. MindManager is able to transform "mind maps" into the Open XML format. This is really cool: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=235048Doug Mahugh was telling me about this a couple weeks ago, but it's the first time I've been able to watch the demo. It's a great example of using the Open XML Formats as a communication format between two completely different types of applications. MindManager is a ...(truncated)...

New Word team blog

(Indexed 2006-09-18):

The Word team has started up a new blog, and Jon Bailor has made the first introduction post: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/ archive/2006/09/15/756756.aspx I've talked with Jon, and he's really excited about giving folks some insight into the thinking that went on in the design of Word 2007. Jon is relatively new to the Word team (a little over a year), so he's also able to give a bit more of an outsider's point of view to some of the designs. -Brian[Image]

Latest changes to the Ecma spec

(Indexed 2006-09-13):

Those of you who using Beta 2 probably noticed that the .docx versions of the Ecma working draft 1.4 didn't open. As I'm sure you've noticed from the latest draft of the spec, we've been working pretty hard over the past several months in the Ecma Technical committee flushing out the specification. It's actually undergone significant changes from the 1.3 draft, which Office Beta 2 was compatible with. Since then we've been significantly updating the documentation and making changes to the actual...(truncated)...

Friday thoughts

(Indexed 2006-09-08):

Some really interesting things to note for the week: New blog on Math in Office Murray Sargent who was the key architect behind the new math functionality in Office 2007 has started blogging. Check out his first post on Formula Autobuildup in Word 2007. Murray was the one who I'd mentioned having discussions with early on about whether or not MathML would be possible to use as the default persistence format for math in Word. It turned out that it wasn't going to meet our needs (another example ...(truncated)...

Difficult decisions between loose conformance and true interoperability

(Indexed 2006-09-08):

Rick Jelliffe had a great post earlier this week discussing the problems you get when you allow for really loose conformance. We've had discussions around this issue in Ecma for the past 9 months. On the one hand, we don't want people to feel like they have to implement the entire standard to be compliant. We want people to benefit from the work we've done, and to choose which parts of the standard they want to use. We also want people to use the standard as a launching pad for their own innovat...(truncated)...

New team blog for the ODF to Open XML converter project

(Indexed 2006-09-05):

Jean Goffinet pointed out that he and the folks working on the ODF to Open XML converter project now have a blog going up on the SourceForge site (http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/blog/). In the latest post, Jean discusses the thinking that went into their decision to use C# and XSLT. I have to admit that I haven't had as much free time as I would like, and have missed out on some of the big developments that have happened so far in the project so it's nice they have the blog which should he...(truncated)...

Random thoughts for a Friday afternoon

(Indexed 2006-09-01):

I haven't blogged in a week, and I figured I should post some thoughts before heading out for the three day weekend:American Football : It's good to see football season starting up again. I went to the Seahawk vs. Raider game last night with my brother and they had a pretty good showing. The first Husky game is tomorrow and that should be fun. My wife doesn't really like football but somehow I got her to agree to come with me to at least 5 of the Husky games this year which should be fun.Ecma St...(truncated)...

Working Draft 1.4 of the Ecma Office Open XML formats available

(Indexed 2006-08-25):

Last week we held the 5th face-to-face meeting of Ecma TC45, and this time it was hosted by Microsoft. It was nice being able to stay out here in Redmond for once . At the meeting, we all agreed to make working draft 1.4 publicly available, which is awesome news. You can now get the latest draft from here: http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC4...(truncated)... Some key things to note in this new draft are: Document reorganization: We got a lot of feedback from the Ecma Coo...(truncated)...

Creating a rich Wordprocessing Document from a database

(Indexed 2006-08-24):

I've been planning to start pulling together some real world examples around the ways in which people are using the Office Open XML formats to make document generation much easier. There are a lot of examples from Office 2003, and we're starting to see folks building even more powerful things with Office 2007. It's even something we're using for the Ecma spec generation. Ever wonder how it's possible to generate and maintain a 5000 page spec that documents almost 10,000 elements, attributes, sim...(truncated)...

ODF to Open XML Translator Project Update

(Indexed 2006-08-23):

Last week we held the Ecma TC45 face-to-face meetings out here in Redmond. It was a really productive week, and there should be a summary of the meetings posted to the Ecma site soon (in addition to an updated working draft of the spec). I'll blog more about that once the summary is posted, but in the mean time I wanted to point out another big milestone that was reached last week. Last Friday, the folks working on the ODF translator tools released the August CTP (0.2-M1 release). This is the fi...(truncated)...

There can be only one?

(Indexed 2006-08-16):

I had a few people point me at a couple of IBM blogs today (Bob Sutor and Rob Weir) and I have to admit I was a little disappointed to see that they are really working hard to continue to push negative views of the Office Open XML formats. Basically they want to position it in such a way that there is a winner and a loser, and it's no surprise that they think the winner should be the one they've put all their resources behind (ODF). It's definitely a strong "us vs. them" mentality that you also ...(truncated)...

Word XHTML - Tables

(Indexed 2006-08-14):

This is the fifth post by Zeyad Rajabi who owns the XHTML output from Word's new blogging feature. In earlier posts, Zeyad discussed a general overview of the XHTML, details on XHML compliance, how we map styles to semantics, and bullets and numbering. Today Zeyad is discussing the ways in which output tables. Today I will be talking about tables in our blogging feature. Similarly to other supported Word features, our XHTML output for tables is not full fidelity. Word 2007 provides you with a ri...(truncated)...

Using XHTML in a WordprocessingML document

(Indexed 2006-08-08):

This question has come up a few times, most recently over on the OpenXMLDeveloper site (http://openxmldeveloper.org/forums/477/ShowThread.aspx#477)The challenge a lot of folks have is that they want to generate a WordprocessingML document using pre-existing content. Often times that content is in other formats, like HTML. This is also the case if you have folks entering rich content in a web form or some other type of HTML control, and then you want to use that content to generate a wordprocessi...(truncated)...

Programmatic Manipulation of the Office Open XML Formats Virtual Lab

(Indexed 2006-08-07):

There are quite a few online labs for Office, but I thought I'd point out this one in particular: Programmatic Manipulation of the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats Virtual LabI have to admit that I haven't tried this one out myself yet, so I'll be really interested to get feedback from folks who give it a try. I remember being asked to give feedback on it awhile ago, and they gave me a basic description of what it would cover. That was actually a good while ago though, but I do remember that it...(truncated)...

No license needed to use the Office Open XML formats

(Indexed 2006-08-04):

I still get folks asking me questions about the licensing of the Open XML formats from time to time, and it seems there is a lot of misinformation out there. It's actually been well over 7 months since we made the move away from licensing the formats and instead just provided a general commitment to not enforce any IP behind the formats. The legal term for this new commitment is CNS (covenant not to sue). This allows anyone to develop against our formats without having to worry about patents, an...(truncated)...

Parsing WordprocessingML using XLinq

(Indexed 2006-08-03):

Here's a post from Eric White where he provides some code samples for using XLinq to parse a WordprocessingML document: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive/2006/08/01/685535.aspxHere's the description of what Eric was trying to accomplish:"Recently, I had a problem where there wasn't a code testing harness that would do exactly what I wanted. I want to grab my code snippet directly from my word document, compile it, run it, and validate the output. In more technical terms, I want to parse so...(truncated)...

Code snippets for generating WordprocessingML files

(Indexed 2006-08-02):

There are now a handful of code snippets from Wouter available over on the openxmldeveloper.org site that you should check out. He's been pulling these together over the past couple weeks, and they are really looking good.Here's what he has up there so far:Building Open XML documents with code snippetsWordProcessingML Snippets: Part 1, utility snippetsWordProcessingML Snippets: Part 2, basic paragraphsWordProcessingML Snippets: Part 3, table structureIt sounds like his next step will be to get a...(truncated)...

Creating a PresentationML file with .Net

(Indexed 2006-08-01):

There is a new article up on the OpenXMLDeveloper.org site showing how to build a basic PresentationML file from text entered into a control. It lets you create numerous slides and specify the title and body for each slide. Check it out: http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/08/01/424.aspxThere have been some similar scripts out there that folks have posted for creating a WordprocessingML document, but this is the first one I've seen for creating PresentationML documents. Very cool.-Brian[Ima...(truncated)...

Office Developer Conference Videos Online

(Indexed 2006-08-01):

Well, it was all the way back in March when we had the Office Developer's conference out here in Redmond. It was a lot of fun, as we actually had a track dedicated to the Open XML formats. There were three separate presentations and we were able to get into some pretty good details. Now, almost 5 months later, we finally have the videos from the conference available online. They are all pretty raw, and definitely unedited, but I figured you might still be interested in taking a look. Here are th...(truncated)...

Spin Spin Sugar

(Indexed 2006-07-27):

OK, forgive the random Sneaker Pimps reference and I promise we will move off this topic of ODF politics we've had the past week or two, but I wanted to call out something that Stephen McGibbon pointed out to me today. He mentioned this blog post he made on Monday entitled Spinning out of Control. Stephen pointed out that in the press release for the ISO approval of ODF, the following statement was made: Billions of existing office documents will be able to be converted to the XML standard forma...(truncated)...

Table models in file formats

(Indexed 2006-07-25):

In my post last week about the lack of table support in ODF, some folks were curious as to why the Ecma Open XML formats have three different table models. I explained that when you are designing a file format, you need to examine closely the target user scenarios of the applications that will use those formats. Obviously the use cases for a table in a spreadsheet are different from those around tables in presentations or wordprocessing documents. For instance, it's not much of a stretch to imag...(truncated)...

Quick question for ODF experts

(Indexed 2006-07-20):

I must be reading this wrong, but in the ODF spec for tables it says the following:"This chapter describes the table structure that is used for tables that are embedded within text documents and for spreadsheets."Could it really be the case that ODF doesn't allow tables in presentations? I know that OpenOffice's presentation application "Impress" doesn't allow for native tables, but I had assumed the ODF format wouldn't have the same restrictions as OpenOffice.Could someone more familiar with OD...(truncated)...

XML in Office Developer Portal

(Indexed 2006-07-20):

There are a number of great sources of information on the new Office Open XML formats out there. I like to think that this blog is one of those sources, but there is also the OpenXMLDeveloper.org community, and the Ecma TC45 site. Another great source of information though that I always forget to mention is actually the official MSDN site for Office XML development: http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/tool/xml/default.aspxThere is a lot of good content up there, and it will continue to grow as we m...(truncated)...

Sample code for generating a SpreadsheetML file

(Indexed 2006-07-18):

Doug Mahugh has another post on programmatically generating a basic Office Open XML file. This latest post shows how to create a simple SpreadsheetML file:This post covers the code for a CreateXlsx program that creates a simple Open XML spreadsheet from scratch using the .NETFramework 3.0 packaging API (System.IO.Packaging), as well as two of the Open XML code snippets that are available on MSDN. Full source code for this sample is provided in the attached ZIP file.While Doug's code uses System....(truncated)...

Politics behind standardization

(Indexed 2006-07-14):

Stephen McGibbon has an interesting blog post based on his observations of the politics behind standardization. He's been involved in a lot of the ODF and Open XML discussions and started looking deeper into the reasons behind ODF going through ISO even though it was not yet feature complete. I think there was a good amount of pressure to wrap things up and say that version 1.0 was ready to go. It will be interesting to see how much further they are able to get with version 1.2. It sounds like t...(truncated)...

New project for converting WordprocessingML to HTML

(Indexed 2006-07-13):

It looks like there is a new project starting up on the OpenXMLDeveloper.org community for transforming WordprocessingML into HTML using XSLT. The first article posted here (http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/333.aspx) starts off just mapping into basic paragraph and text formatting, and it's super simple and straightforward. I've been told that Sanjay plans to have some future updates to this soon that will start to include other functionality. It would be great to see who else is interested ...(truncated)...

Word XHTML - Bullets and Numbering

(Indexed 2006-07-12):

This is the fourth post by Zeyad Rajabi who owns the XHTML output from Word's new blogging feature. In earlier posts, Zeyad discussed a general overview of the XHTML, details on XHML compliance, and how we map styles to semantics. Today Zeyad is discussing the ways in which styles have been directly tied to specific XHTML tags. Today will be a short post about lists in our blogging feature. Word 2007 provides you with a rich editing experience that allows you to create a multitude of different t...(truncated)...

More information on the Open XML translator and some questions answered

(Indexed 2006-07-11):

There were a lot of great comments from last week's announcement about the creation of an open source project to transform between the Ecma Office Open XML formats and the OASIS OpenDocument format. Rather than respond to all the comments and questions directly, I thought it would be better just to write up another post to address the general themes people have raised. Here are the main questions: Will the translator only work with Office 2007? Aren't there licensing differences that make ODF an...(truncated)...

Open XML Translator project announced (ODF support for Office)

(Indexed 2006-07-06):

Today we are announcing the creation of the Open XML Translator project that will help translate between the Office Open XML formats and the OpenDocument format. We've talked a lot about the value the Open XML formats bring, and one of them of course is the ability to filter it down into other formats. While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments. We've had some governments request that we help bu...(truncated)...

TechEd presentation on Office Open XML available for download

(Indexed 2006-07-05):

For those of you who weren't able to attend my talk at TechEd 2006 on the file formats, you can actually view it online here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?E...(truncated)... quality of the video isn't great, but it actually does a decent job capturing the demos. The background for the PPT slides doesn't come through too clearly though (but it's not really that big of a deal). You'll also have to deal with my mono-tone presentation style, but hopefully the content he...(truncated)...

Sample code for creating a DOCX file

(Indexed 2006-06-29):

Doug Mahugh had a post a couple days ago where he provides some basic code that will generate a WordprocessingML document: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2006/06/27/649007.aspxSome folks have been asking about examples of how to create a basic document with the required relationships, content types, and parts. Doug had actually blogged on Monday that he would put up examples for all three document types, and this is the first of those examples. Doug is very active on the OpenXMLDeveloper....(truncated)...

Writing managed solutions for Office 2007

(Indexed 2006-06-27):

Patrick Smith has a post up on Dave Gainer's blog talking about the updated PIA story for Office 2007: (2007 Microsoft Office System Primary Interop Assemblies)-Brian[Image]

Back from Sapporo - tons of progress in Ecma

(Indexed 2006-06-26):

Well, it has definitely been a pretty hectic couple weeks, and it's going to take me awhile to get caught up. I was in Boston two weeks ago for TechEd, and in Sapporo last week for Ecma meetings. Both were great trips, but it's nice to be home. The meetings in Sapporo were extremely productive, and you can actually read all about it in the status report filed by Tom Ngo from NextPage (http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC...(truncated)... Some of the key things I wanted to ...(truncated)...

Code snippets for working with the Open XML formats

(Indexed 2006-06-17):

This is my first time on an airplane with wifi, so I'm pleased to bring this news to you from somewhere over the pacific.I've been promising for the past year that one of the big things we're going to do this time around that we didn't do much of with the 2003 XML formats was to provide a whole bunch of examples. The openxmldeveloper.org site is going to be the best place for people to share their experiences and code, but it's also really important that we at Microsoft give examples of how to d...(truncated)...

More on the PDF support in Office

(Indexed 2006-06-16):

In the comments of my latest post around the legal issues were currently dealing with from Adobe around our PDF support in Office 2007 a number of folks were wondering when Adobe would provide their side of the story. Well while I was down in Tech Ed, there was a press release from Adobe that you can view here. I just got back today and was pointed at the official Microsoft response. You should take a look, I think there are some really good clarifying statements.Adobe said that they view PDF as...(truncated)...

Interoperability by design

(Indexed 2006-06-14):

Today we announced the formation of a new customer council focused on interoperability (how to make technologies work better together). I'm sure you've noticed over time that Microsoft has made a strong commitment to work towards better interoperability, and this is a big step forward in achieving that goal. I personally have focused on interoperability issues for about the past 6 years or so in working on extensible technologies like the object model and both the HTML and XML file formats. It's...(truncated)...

Learn more about Word 2007's support for seperating data from presentation

(Indexed 2006-06-12):

If you're heading out to TechEd this week like I am, you should definitely plan on attending Tristan Davis' talk on Thursday afternoon that covers the new functionality in Word 2007 for custom XML solutions. This talk goes into great detail on the true power of XML in Office applications. XML file formats are obviously important, but the really exciting stuff isn't what you can do with the wordprocessing schemas but instead it's with the support for your own schemas. People want their office doc...(truncated)...

TechEd Boston

(Indexed 2006-06-09):

Who else is going to be heading out to Boston next week for Tech Ed 2006? I'll be out there for a couple days in the middle of the week. I'm presenting Wednesday from 5:30-6:45, so be sure to swing by and say hi.Here's the information on my session:OFC324 Microsoft Office Open XML FormatsDay/Time: Wednesday, June 14 5:30 PM - 6:45 PM Room: 253 ABCSpeaker(s): Brian JonesLearn about the huge change that will affect the role Office documents can now play in business processes and solutions. Previ...(truncated)...

Word XHTML - Mapping styles to semantics

(Indexed 2006-06-08):

This is the third post by Zeyad Rajabi who owns the XHTML output from Word's new blogging feature. In earlier posts, Zeyad discussed a general overview of the XHTML as well as a more detailed post on XHML compliance. Today Zeyad is discussing the ways in which styles have been directly tied to specific XHTML tags. Today I wanted to talk a bit about the template that we use for the Word 2007 blogging feature. Word has always concentrated on the presentation of documents and making it easy for peo...(truncated)...

Thoughts on Open XML in ISO

(Indexed 2006-06-05):

As we move forward with the standardization of the Office Open XML formats, it's interesting to look at the motivations that brought us to this point, but also to think about what is still to come. We've wanted to provide folks with easier ways to work with our formats for years now, mainly because it significantly increases the value of Office documents when they are fully documented. An open format can integrate with business processes; databases; and workflows in a much simpler and more power...(truncated)...

Highlighting in a document

(Indexed 2006-06-01):

I've had a lot of folks ask me to provide more information on what features are missing from ODF and why it was that we decided to create out own XML format (Open XML). I didn't want to get too involved in pulling together a full detailed list, but it's probably worthwhile pointing things out every once and awhile. Most of you know that ODF wasn't even around when we first started working on our XML formats, so that's really one of the big reasons. Another reason is that we need to make sure tha...(truncated)...

Word XHTML - Compliance and Styles

(Indexed 2006-05-30):

This is the 2nd post in a series by Zeyad Rajabi who is a program manager working on Word's XHTML output used in Word's new blogging feature. My first blog gave a brief introduction on our XHTML output for the blogging feature in Word 2007. This post will outline details on the styles we output. Goals In my last post I said we wanted to be XHTML compliant by the time we ship this blogging feature. Today I want to be a little clearer as to what I mean: strict vs. transitional. Working on Word I h...(truncated)...

Spreadsheet performance - Shared Formulas

(Indexed 2006-05-29):

I wanted to follow up on the thread I started a couple weeks ago discussing the design goals behind spreadsheetML. There's a whole host of things we've done to make sure that the move to XML formats is a huge benefit to developers, without it actually having a significant negative impact on our end users. Moving our formats into an open XML format significantly increases the relevance and value of Office files because they can have more interactive roles with business processes and systems. If t...(truncated)...

Numbering formats in ODF

(Indexed 2006-05-26):

I was wondering if someone more familiar with the ODF spec could help me out. I had made the following reply yesterday to Alex's assertion that ODF was as feature rich as Open XML and I want to make sure that I'm not misstating things: I think you might want to dig a bit deeper into the formats. ODF does build on existing industry standards, but at times they are partial implementations, and it still leaves out a lot. For instance, Open XML actually uses more of the dublin core metadata schema t...(truncated)...

Beta downloads and One year anniversary

(Indexed 2006-05-25):

Hard to believe it's only been a year since I first started blogging... so much has happened. It's really great that we went out so early with the news of the file format change, we started talking about it an entire year before we shipped a public beta. I think that helped to get a lot of the questions answered ahead of time, which is really important.Speaking of the Beta, you may have noticed that the servers are really bogged down right now. A number of folks have had trouble getting the prod...(truncated)...

4000 pages of documentation

(Indexed 2006-05-24):

There has been a great overall reaction to the news last week of Ecma's first public draft for the Office Open XML formats. One thing that is now absolutely clear to everyone that we are talking about an extremely rich and powerful set of file formats. I think many folks didn't realize the amount of work we've had to take on, which explains why some had the false assumption that we could just use ODF. We were pretty clear in our response that it just wouldn't work for our customers because at th...(truncated)...

DocBook to WordprocessingML conversion

(Indexed 2006-05-23):

I just ran across this link today and was wondering if anyone else had checked it out: http://shudson310.blogspot.com/2006/05/docbook-xsl-170-released.htmlIt looks like there is a docbook project up on sourceforge that has XSLT support for going from WordprocessingML into DocBook (or the other way around). I haven't had a chance to look into it yet... sounds pretty cool though.-Brian[Image]

XHTML in Word 2007's blogging tool

(Indexed 2006-05-22):

Today we have a guest writer to discuss the HTML output that we have in the new blogging functionality for Word 2007. His name is Zeyad Rajabi and he's a program manager on the Word team. Zeyad works on file format related issues, including the HTML support in Word. All of Zeyad's posts will be under the "Word HTML" category if you are interested in tracking those seperately. As some of you may know from Joe Friends blog, Word 2007 will allow users to author blogs straight from Word. I want to f...(truncated)...

Draft 1.3 of the Ecma Office Open XML formats standard

(Indexed 2006-05-18):

Wow, we finally have an updated draft of the Ecma Office Open XML formats standard! http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC4...(truncated)... I've been waiting for a long time to be able to share all the great work that's been going on in Ecma TC45, and it's so awesome that we have a new public draft. I can't wait to hear what everyone thinks. If you go to that site, you'll see three different downloads:Draft 1.3 of the spec - The big download is the spec itself in PDF form....(truncated)...

Programmatically manipulate properties in a WordprocessingML file

(Indexed 2006-05-17):

There is a new article that will be in the June MSDN magazine that shows how to work with a Word document's properties programmatically. The author, Ken Getz has actually been working on building a collection of code snippets that people can use to do different things with Open XML files. I believe most of the snippets he's building leverage the WinFX system.io.packaging apis for cracking the ZIP and walking through the relationships (but of course you could use any ZIP library).I'm not sure whe...(truncated)...

Does tag size matter?

(Indexed 2006-05-16):

Surprisingly, I haven't seen much information out there discussing the performance impacts of XML tag name lengths (ie using "" instead of ""). My last post about some of the design goals behind SpreadsheetML raised some questions from folks about where the time is actually spent when loading an XML file. There are a ton of things that we do to improve the performance when opening and saving Open XML files. The move to using these formats as the default for Office 2007 meant we had to get really...(truncated)...

Hey, let's start talking about the technologies and what kind of solutions we can build!

(Indexed 2006-05-12):

There were a few interesting articles I saw this week that I wanted to point people at. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/14543676.htm " if government locks in winners and losers, manufacturers will focus on courting government, rather than innovating. The recent technology policy debate in Massachusetts offers a case in point. In September 2005, after lobbying by IBM, Sun Microsystems and others, the state's Information Technology Division (ITD) announced that all governme...(truncated)...

Blogging from Word 2007

(Indexed 2006-05-12):

Joe Friend has finally made it public that there will be built in blog functionality in Word 2007! I used it for authoring my last post, and I loved it. I wanted to mention it at the time, but didn't want to take away any of Joe's thunder. :-) I had to go through and clean up a couple things, but as Joe said, this feature is coming in a bit hot. Unfortunately, I'm still on Office 2003 here at home so I'm just writing this post in the web form (maybe I should have just waited until I got into wor...(truncated)...

Design Goals Behind SpreadsheetML

(Indexed 2006-05-10):

It's been awhile since I've talked in detail about the SpreadsheetML schema and I apologize. I had a number of posts back in the summer which talked through Office XP's SpreadsheetML format that we built about 6 years ago, but obviously a lot has changed since then. The new SpreadsheetML that is part of the Open XML formats coming with Office 2007 had to undergo serious work in order to make it ready to be the default format. As you all know, the majority of folks don't really care about what ki...(truncated)...

Updated draft of the Open XML spec coming this month

(Indexed 2006-05-04):

I'm in New York right now, and I was talking to some folks yesterday about the work that we've been doing in Ecma. It reminded me that I hadn't posted very much information on by blog though about how the meeting in London went last month. Adam Farquhar of the British Library posted a great summary of the meeting, so rather than repeat everything, I thought I'd just point you guys at that. Here is what he had to say:The Ecma International Technical Committee (TC45) is working to establish a stan...(truncated)...

Create a webpage for editing WordprocessingML documents

(Indexed 2006-04-27):

Sorry to have taken so long between blog posts. I was off in London all last week for the latest face to face meeting of Ecma TC45 at the British Library. It was a great meeting and we made a ton of progress. Unfortunately, I haven't had any time to blog though, and I have to go back on the road next week (San Francisco and New York). The amount of interest in the Open XML formats is really exciting, but it's also a lot of work :-)Over at the OpenXMLDeveloper.org site, there is a new article tha...(truncated)...

Off to London

(Indexed 2006-04-17):

Well, Im off to the next Ecma TC45 face to face meeting where well continue to make progress in the Open XML format standardization effort. This time were meeting out in London. Adam Farquhar of the British Library is the Vice-Chair of TC45, and hes been gracious enough to host the meeting. It will be really great having this event at the British Library were so many invaluable documents are preserved. Makes you really think about true long term interoperability and longevity of file formats.It...(truncated)...

Create your own simple Open XML editor

(Indexed 2006-04-13):

You can create your very own Open XML editor! Over on openxmldeveloper.org, there is a new article that shows how you can quickly generate an extremely simple editor for creating WordprocessingML files. When I say "really simple" I mean it though. I'm talking about a plain text control where you can insert text, and from that generate a Word document. No rich formatting, no pictures, no tables... just plain text. I love to see tools like this cropping up though, especially given that we aren't e...(truncated)...

What other schemas are supported?

(Indexed 2006-04-12):

I've had a few folks ask me about other industry standard schemas out there like HR-XML, XBRL, DocBook, etc. The out of the box schemas that are supported are WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, and PresenatationML. As I've discussed numerous times though, there is also support for custom defined schema, which means you can take your own schemas and work with them in the applications:Create a rich Word document based on your own custom XML (without the need for XSLT)Intro to Word XML Part 3: Using ...(truncated)...

Intro to PresentationML part 1 - Core architecture and the "presentation" part

(Indexed 2006-04-11):

I've really dropped the ball here over the past several months. I'd been meaning to post some example PresentationML files and give everyone a walkthrough of the format, but I keep falling behind. Sorry folks.Today, I'd like to give you a basic overview of the PresentationML format. I'll try to keep it fairly high level today, and then hopefully get into more details in future posts. Let's first start with the basic architecture behind PresentationML. Presentations are naturally componentized: P...(truncated)...

New Bio-IT Alliance will take advantage of the Open XML formats

(Indexed 2006-04-04):

Here's another example of folks getting ready to take advantage of the Open XML formats for their business solutions. The newly announced BioIT alliance (http://www.medadnews.com/News/Index.cfm?articleid=328651) was formed to help connect the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware and software industries. As you can imagine, Open XML formats can play a huge role here. Check out this quote: "Through the BioIT Alliance, we are working closely with Microsoft to increase data access across our ins...(truncated)...

What about Word 2003's XML format?

(Indexed 2006-04-04):

I've had a few folks ask me about the XML format from Word 2003, and whether or not it would be supported in Word 2007. I mentioned this back in the fall, but in case you missed it let me repeat that the Word 2003 format will continue to be supported in Word 2007. There are a ton of folks out there who have already built solutions on top of the Word 2003 XML format, and those will continue to work. Everyone can decide for themselves whether they want to port those solutions forward into the new ...(truncated)...

Document Sciences joins OpenXMLDeveloper.org

(Indexed 2006-03-29):

I just saw that Document Sciences has also joined the OpenXMLDeveloper.org site (story here). It's been a pretty fun week seeing all the folks joining the community. It's pretty suprising that after only a week we already have over 250 registered users and over 40 companies.I'm really excited about the value this site will bring to folks, especially once the public Beta 2 comes out in the next few months. There are already a number of good articles and discussions up there, and it's only been a ...(truncated)...

Momentum around the Open XML formats continues to grow!

(Indexed 2006-03-23):

I always forget how much fun these developer conferences can be. On Tuesday, we had an entire afternoon focused on the Open XML formats. There were three presentations focusing on different aspects of the formats, followed by a couple hours of food and drinks at the conference. After that, a bunch of us headed over to a poolhall in Bellevue to play some pool, drink some beer, and talk about the new openxmldeveloper.org community. My first presentation on Tuesday was pretty much an overview of ev...(truncated)...

A new Open XML Developer community

(Indexed 2006-03-21):

There exist today billions of documents in the Office binary formats. With the move to the standard Open XML formats as the default for Office 2007; the free updates allowing Office 2000, XP, and 2003 to also support those formats; and the participation of other software companies like Apple in the Ecma standardization efforts, it's only a matter of time before there are billions of files in the Open XML format. You have the opportunity to be one of the first to learn, develop with, and provide ...(truncated)...

Microsoft Office Developers Conference

(Indexed 2006-03-20):

This should be an awesome week. We have a ton of folks out here in Redmond for the Microsoft Office Developers Conference. If you didn't recieve an invitation, but would still like to follow what's going on, you can sign up for the live webcast tomorrow morning of Bill Gates and Kurt DelBene's presentation: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=63190We're going to have a track tomorrow afternoon focusing specifically on the file formats. For those of you coming out for the conference, check out...(truncated)...

The newer Office 2007 User Interface

(Indexed 2006-03-10):

Since Beta 1, the Office team has been hard at work refining the new UI. Yesterday they revealed the latest work, and for those of you on Beta 1, you'll notice that things are much more crisp. If you haven't seen any of the screenshots yet, you should check out Jensen's post: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/03/09/547281.aspxJensen has a bunch of screenshots and if you haven't been to his site yet, I highly recommend it. He puts me to shame with the amount of content he posts (he posts...(truncated)...

Programmatically remove parts from an Office file

(Indexed 2006-02-23):

Kevin Boske has another post on using the System.IO.Packaging assembly to work with the new Office Open XML formats. He shows how you can quickly open the package and navigate the relationships to find a specific part, then remove that part. http://blogs.msdn.com/kevinboske/archive/2006/02/22/537439.aspx This is great if you want to clean up a file. Let's say you want to always remove comments from a document before it's posted on the web. Or maybe you want to remove the VBA from a macro-enabled...(truncated)...

Inclusion of alternate formats

(Indexed 2006-02-22):

Here's a question I got from someone wanting to store alternative formats in the files:Want to know if alternative formats can also be stored in the same office XML zip format. E.g., Is it possible that the XML file format also stores the 2003 binary format as an alternative? Or a pdf version of it along?This would provide the user another level of backup if some part of the XML format is corrupt.Does the current Open XML schema allow such inclusions?I have access to the beta 1, but I could not ...(truncated)...

How Office detects that a UNC path is really a WebDAV URL

(Indexed 2006-02-17):

This is a bit off topic, but when I received this question I realized that we don't have the answer available anywhere so I wanted to post it just in case other folks were interested. Here is the question:Please forgive this random email, but I'm desperately trying to find out how Office knows when it has opened a UNC path which is really a WebDAV URL exposed by the XP mini-redirector, as described by the KB excerpt below. If you have any information about this or can point me to someone who doe...(truncated)...

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