Office file manipulation used to be difficult, but since Office 2007, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files can be read and written without anything more complicated than the native JDK itself because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than ZIP files of XML documents. Ted Neward demonstrates this in action.
OpenXML SDK 2.0 for MS Office provides strongly typed part classes to manipulate Open XML documents. WorddocGenerator, an open source utility for generating template driven word files is one example of what can be done with this SDK. InfoQ got in touch with Atul Verma the developer of this utility to ask him a few questions about this project.
When working with Excel documents, developers usually use raw XML or rely on the Office Automation libraries. But the Office Automation library is not appropriate for servers and working with XML can be quite tedious. ClosedXML bridges the gap by providing an easy to use Office-like API without the overhead of COM. To introduce this library we spoke with Manuel De Leon of the ClosedXML project.
Open XML SDK 2.0 offers a moderately high level API for manipulating Open XML documents using strongly typed classes. It includes the Open XML SDK v2.0 Productivity Tool, which can reverse engineer a Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document and display the C# code needed to recreate it.
PowerTools for Open XML is a PowerShell extension that makes it easy to create and manipulate MS Office documents from the command line.
Microsoft's attempt to officially standardize the Office Open XML Format (OOXML) by the ISO-Standards ISO/IEC DIS 29500 has failed. National standard bodies have been asked to give their vote on OOXML by September 2.
Rob Weir has called the spreadsheet formulas into question. Lost in the posturing and grandstanding are some serious holes in the specification.
With the new OpenXML format, there is the promise of an clean and efficient way to manipulate Office documents via XML. But with a 6000+ page spec, finding the exact nodes one needs to manipulate is a non-trivial task. To address this, OpenXML libraries for both Java and .NET are in the works.
Microsoft has been touting a new way to build composite applications using the acronym, “OBA”. The intended sweet spot for OBA is within the Lines of Business within the greater Enterprise cloud. The OBA framework capitalizes on the large number of Microsoft Office licenses that have been sold world-wide.
