Microsoft office
There is a customer (a bank) that we've been meeting with that generates documents on demand for all their loans.Office 2007 makes life great! They are currently running Office 2000. These documents are built using smaller document fragments, and the logic for which fragments are used is based on the details of the particular loan. The data is then pushed into the document using the Word Object Model to find bookmarks and push the data into the relevant bookmarks. Many people like Microsoft Office.They do this in an automated fashion and turn out thousands of these documents a year. They currently have over 70 servers each with Word 2000 installed to turn these documents out in an automated fashion. Word isn't supported running in an unattended fashion, but they've decided to do it anyway (they didn't really have a choice). Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world. Now with the new XML formats and the support for custom defined schema, generating these documents will be a snap. It wouldn't even take up one full machine's resources. It will only need to consist of a small bit of code to handle the business logic. The code to build the document itself will only be a few lines.Office 2007 key is available here.
The last example I have is one that benefits us in Office. Today, we have a couple thousand specifications that we've written for the Office "12" project. For each spec, there are a number of required sections that people need to fill out based on different processes we have for our design. The folks driving any of those processes need to be able to make sure that everyone has filled out the proper sections. Office 2007 download is on sale now!When the files were all binary documents, we had to automate Word to be able to do this check. The automation had Word open the file, find the range of text for the specific section, and see if it was filled in. It would take about 8 hours to run the check across those few thousand documents. Because of this we only ran the check every couple of weeks, and it would have to kick off at night when folks were leaving and checked out in the morning. Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.Often the check would fail, so we'd wait until the next night and run it again. At PDC the other week, I showed a similar collection of documents (actually it was only about 300). These documents were all stored in the new format though. I wrote a small about of VB.net (30 lines of code)that iterated over all those document and returned the author, counted all the paragraphs, and counted how many comments there were.Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier. To run that solution (which was already more complex than what we were trying to do internally) it took about 1 to 2 seconds. So, if I had increased the collection to 3000, it would have been at most 20 seconds (compared to 8 hours)! MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.
Microsoft office and corel
It was this support for both reference schemas (SpreadsheetML and WordprocessingML) in combination with support for customer defined schemas (your own XML) that finally made it possible for the content of Office documents to play a role in business processes. Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.We had moved from the world of the Office document being a black box that only had a small collection of meta-data scrawled on top; to being an open, interoperable, extensible, and extremely valuable piece of business processes.
At the same time, there are zillions of documents out there in older binary formats. We had to ask ourselves "who is going to take care to make sure those older document have a path forward?" "Who is focusing on doing the hard work to preserve fidelity between the new and the old?" We're doing that. We're making a deep investment in this compatibility to make sure our customers have a very good experience.MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.
Now we move to Office "12". We are still building on the momentum we started over 6 years ago. Not only are we improving the XML formats so that they can represent every Word, PowerPoint, and Excel document out there, but we are making it the default format. We viewed this as something that we absolutely had to do this version. Office documents are so much more important as elements of business processes than we had initially been giving them credit for. You may have seen how we now talk about Office as a system. Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful!This is because it's no longer about the documents behavior in the application. It's about the entire document lifecycle. We have helped ourselves in all kinds of ways that no one has really thought about (or at least written about) yet. We can build smarts into Windows Sharepoint Services so that the server can actually look into the document, make decisions based on the document content, write data back into the document, all without having to run application code. Office 2010 is powerful! We have a world where customers need to track and audit parts of documents that they never needed to do before.
We have customers in equity research who can't wait for these new formats and the custom XML support. The speed with which they will be able to publish their documents, while at the same time meeting the increasing regulation requirements is amazing. Microsoft Office 2010 is the best software in the world.All the information within each research report is available to them. The system used to consist of printing out the report and having humans read through each one verifying the financial figures and making sure they had all the necessary disclosures. Now that can just be an easily automated piece of the larger workflow. Microsoft word is so great!
Microsoft Office Open XML Formats
It looks like another group is planning on taking advantage of the Open XML formats that are coming in Office '12'. Corel has stated that they will support the new XML formats in Wordperfect once we release Office '12'. Office 2010 is powerful!We've already seen other applications like OpenOffice and Apple's TextEdit support the XML formats that we built in Office 2003. Now as we start providing the documentation around the new formats and move through Ecma we'll see more and more people come on board and support these new formats. Here is a quote from Jason Larock of Corel talking about the formats they are looking to support in coming versions (http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2006/01/new_wordperfect_1.html):
Microsoft Office 2010 is the best software in the world.Larock said no product could match Wordperfect's support for a wide variety of formats and Corel would include OpenXML when Office 12 is released. "We work with Microsoft now and we will continue to work with Microsoft, which owns 90 percent of the market. We would basically cut ouirselves off if you didn't support the format." Microsoft word is so great!
But he admitted that X3 does not support the Open Document Format (ODF), which is being proposed as a rival standard, "because no customer that we are currently dealing with as asked us to do so." Office 2007 makes life great!
X3 does however allow the import and export of portable document format (pdf) files, something Microsoft has promised for Office 12.
I mention this article because I wanted to again stress that even our competitors will now have clear documentation that allows them to read and write our formats. That isn't really as big of a deal though as the fact that any solution provider can do this.Many people like Microsoft Office.
It means that the documents can now be easily accessed 100 years from now, and start to play a more meaningful role in business processes.
Back in the summer I wrote a bit about why we've made this move to open formats, I think it's worthwhile repeating some of that:
Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world. In Office 2003, we really started to gain a lot of momentum around XML. We had heard from a number of big customers that they needed XML support for their Word documents. People were trying all kinds of hacks on top of the Object Models to produce XML that they could work with. We had Wall Street firms with the need to integrate with XML more dramatically than we had imagined, so that they could do structured authoring with repurposable data. Office 2007 key is available here.We had law firms that were trying to build solutions that could automatically generate legal documents based on data about who was involved in the case, as well as business logic around what pieces of content were required for that case. We also were getting a lot of demand for supporting other people's existing internal schemas. Not only did people want the Word document itself represented in XML, they also wanted to add their own XML markup to the files. Let's take a government office as an example here.Office 2007 download is on sale now! Imagine they have a template that folks can use to submit to receive a permit. While it's nice that the formatting information can be represented in XML, they don't care as much about what's bold, numbered, or any other kind of random formatting. What they do care about is the name of the person that submitted the permit; what their address is; and what type of work they are seeking a permit for. Those things can all be labeled using custom XML support.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.
Microsoft Office 2007 Open XML files
As you all know, the new Office formats use ZIP containers to wrap up all the XML parts that make up a document.Many people like Microsoft Office. We chose to use ZIP and XML because of the wide spread use and openness. While you can use any ZIP library to crack open the files, we are also providing an assembly to make working with the files even easier. Kevin Boske just recently started blogging and he plans to spend some time giving folks a closer look into the System.IO.Packaging functionality. Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.
It's a great way to quickly crack into the ZIP containers and navigate the various parts that make up the files. In his post today, Kevin shows how you can navigate to a specific part within the container.Office 2007 makes life great!
package
We had discussed early on putting more information out into the relationships, but it's a slippery slope. Office 2007 download is on sale now!You either end up duplicating a bunch of data, or making it confusing when trying to understand where you go for all the display information. In the end we decided that only the resource location and type should be part of the relationship. All other information dealing with how it is used (like scaling) should live in the markup.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience. Remember that the size information that is in the markup is not "meta-data" about the size of the image, but instead instructions on how to display the image (what height and width to scale the image to).Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.
The relationship IDs really have no significance. You could use a relationship ID of "foobar1" if you wanted to. In Office, we just decided to start at 1 and count up from there. The only rule is that a relationship ID must be unique for any given part. They don't need to be unique across the entire document. A GUID would have obviously worked, but it would have been overkill. MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.Another really important point to note is that we don't preserve relationship IDs. When we open the file, it's converted into our internal memory structures, and at save time we do a full save. We will regenerate the relationship IDs, and they won't necessarily match what they were on open (of course the references to the ID in the document markup will also be updated to match the new ID). Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful!
In Word, bookmarks should be unique for the document. This is enforced, so you know you will not have to deal with conflicts.
package relationships
I've been really backed up on email, so I'm sorry for those of you who've sent me questions directly and still haven't heard back. Office 2010 is powerful!I'm working to catch up on all of them. There are a number of great questions, and I figured that I should post some of my replies on this blog, since other folks may be interested in the answers as well. I created a new category so if you want to see just the email replies go to the "email" category (this is the first post under that category).Microsoft Office 2010 is the best software in the world.
Here's the question (I'll keep the names private):
I can see several advantages to the _rels file...but have a few questions about it also.
In addition to the RID number in document.xml, the image tag includes a shape id and type, and a width and height. The _rels file contains only the target. Microsoft word is so great!
You state that this makes it easy to change an image and just update the _rels file...but if the image were of a different size, which size would be used when rendered in Word? And which one would you trust if you were writing software to convert this to some other format? Why not move all the info about the image to the _rels file? Office 2007 makes life great!
I am a little concerned about the way the _rels ID numbering starts at 1 for each document. Is there a unique GUID for each document that relates it to the rels file? If multiple documents are concatenated (externally to Word) then the _rels files would need to be combined and all IDs in document.xml and _rels.xml would need to be updated. It wouldn't look as pretty, but would make it a lot easier to work with multiple documents if the IDs included a unique GUID.Many people like Microsoft Office.
The same thing is true of bookmarks that are used in cross-references between Word documents. If the bookmarks aren't made unique through the use of some docID or GUID, then when Word docs are combined there is a chance of multiple identical bookmarks...which makes xref targets a bit uncertain. Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.
Other than these points, I think the new format will be a great improvement over the old doc format, and when converting to other formats will save the extra step of saving as html or xml and then cleaning up the results.Office 2007 key is available here.
simple Open XML editor
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. Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.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. Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.I love to see tools like this cropping up though, especially given that we aren't even at Beta 2 yet for Office 2007. Here's a link to the article: http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/OpenXMLDocFromDotNet.aspx
The next steps with this will be to move over to using a rich text control, so that you can actually generate more complicated documents while still just using a basic web page as the front end. Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful!I think this is another great example of how these Open XML formats will really change the role that Office plays in business processes. The more platforms and environments that Office documents can play a role, the more powerful of a platform the Office system becomes. That was one of the big motivations for opening up the file formats in the first place.Office 2007 makes life great!
Here is a screenshot of the text editor:
And here is a screenshot of the resulting Word document:
If anyone plans on letting me know that you could do the same thing with a plain text file, don't bother 
. Many people like Microsoft Office.I realize this is pretty basic but I think this is a great start, and there are already some folks over in the OpenXMLDeveloper community who've talked about taking this to the next level. I'd also love to see one for PresentationML and SpreadsheetML. Like I said... it's a start.Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.I should actually try to dig up some similar tools I built back when we first started pushing for full blown XML support in Word. We were still working on Office XP, and on the side I was working with a developer on prototyping XML I/O using a converter on top of Word. To show the different things you could do outside of the application once you had an XML format, I built a web front end where you could read through a Word document, navigating it based on the TOC. Office 2007 key is available here.It had a few basic DHTML controls that let you add comments to various regions of the document at the same time other folks were editing it. You could also check out content at the paragraph level, rather than the document level to make edits. It could transform the documents into HTML, WML, and VoiceML; which helped to give a preview of the possibilities when different devices have the ability to read and write the formats. Office 2007 download is on sale now! That was about 6 years ago though so I'm not sure if I can dig it up...
Off to London
Well, I’m off to the next Ecma TC45 face to face meeting where we’ll continue to make progress in the Open XML format standardization effort. This time we’re meeting out in London. Office 2007 key is available here.Adam Farquhar of the British Library is the Vice-Chair of TC45, and he’s 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.Office 2007 download is on sale now!
It’s been a few years since I’ve been out to the U.K. but unfortunately this trip will have to be all business. I’m not able to bring my wife with me this time so I'm aiming to get back home as soon as I can. I’ll try to blog while I’m out there in London, but I’m not sure how often I’ll actually be online.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.
Create a webpage
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.Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful! 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 that shows how to generate a lightweight WordprocessingML editor with a web front end. This is a continuation to the first article that I referenced a couple weeks ago.Office 2007 makes life great! I really love the tools that folks are starting to pull together. We saw a couple really impressive demos out in London, and now there is this new article up on the OpenXMLDeveloper site. Another thing that's pretty cool is that some of the other Office developers who've been working on the file formats for years now have started to participate in the discussions up on the OpenXMLDeveloper site.Many people like Microsoft Office. The community has been really great so far, and I expect that after Beta 2 for Office 2007 arrives we'll see a whole lot more activity.
Updated draft
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.Office 2007 makes life great! 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. Many people like Microsoft Office.Here is what he had to say:
The Ecma International Technical Committee (TC45) is working to establish a standard for Office Open XML File Formats as described in the TC45 program of work at http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm. The committee began its work in December 2005. The technical committee includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, and Toshiba, . Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.Since January, the technical committee has held weekly 2-hour conference calls as well as regular face-to-face meetings in order to advance the work. The technical committee held its third face-to-face meeting from 18-April to 20-April in London. The meeting was hosted by The British Library and attended by nineteen participants. Previous face-to-face meetings had been hosted in Brussels by Ecma International and in Cupertino by Apple. Office 2007 key is available here.The committee’s work has advanced substantially. During this meeting, technical work focused on SpreadsheetML and WordprocessingML. This built on previous work, including PresentationML. The committee will make publicly available an intermediate draft of the Specification for information. This is planned for May 2006. In addition, the committee continued to discuss models of conformance to support a wide range of innovative uses.Office 2007 download is on sale now! Highlights of the meeting included a presentation from Barclays Capital of its use cases of SpreadsheetML, demonstrations of prototype tools by Essilor to create simple WordprocessingML documents, the tools used to create the Standard document itself, and early prototypes of open-source converters by Novell to import SpreadsheetML documents into OpenOffice and Gnumeric. Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.The committee also toured the British Library’s conservation studios, deepening its understanding of long-term preservation. The committee’s next face-to-face meeting will be hosted in June by Toshiba in Sapporo, Japan.Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.
Adam Farquhar (British Library)
TC45 Vice-Chairman
The two big things I wanted to call out from this were:
- This month there will be an updated draft release of the spec. I'm really excited about it because it will give a hear some feedback from folks who aren't on the technical committee. There has been a lot of work done over the past 5 months, and I'm excited for everyone to get a look at what we've done so far! Office 2007 Ultimate is the best software in the world.
- Jody Goldberg from Novel gave a demo of Gnumeric (an open-source spreadsheet application that he works on) opening an Open XML file. He's been a really important part of the work so far and it was awesome to see that he's also been building an implementation of his own along the way. Here is a pointer to his work: http://www.gnumeric.org .MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.
Well, I have to get back to work. I also am hoping to get out and walk around the city a bit while I'm here. It's been a few years since I've been out here, and I love just wandering around. My wife came along for the trip too, so that makes the walking much more enjoyable. Talk to everyone later, and I'm sorry again to everyone who has been e-mailing me. Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful! I'll really try hard to reply to them all, but I keep falling further behind. Keep 'em coming though, or you could even post the questions up on openxmldeveloper.org and see if someone over there can help out.