Search this blog:

TO ASK A QUESTION: If you have a question or need help with Office, please feel free to use the 'Click to Contact' link at the bottom of this page. You'll get a form that you can use to email a question to me. (I had been getting a ton of spam when accepting direct emails, so only emails that use this form will get through to me.)

Please be sure to mention the version of Office you are using when you send your question.

I answer all e-mails that I receive via this form, as long as they are polite :)

Since disabling comments on this site, I'm actually hearing from more of you with questions ... so, as it seems people prefer to email rather than comment, I'm going to leave comments disabled. As always, you can ask me any Office-related questions you have. If the question is outside of my expertise, I'll try to direct you to where you can get an answer.

Open XML (which, among other things, is behind the new file formats used for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 (as well as the 2008 versions for Mac)) have surely gotten their share of attention, positive and negative, as their supporters and detractors fought for the past couple of years over their right to exist as a recognized international standard. An extraordinary amount of work went into Open XML's hard-won victory to become an ISO standard, as finally announced last month, and an extraordinary amount of drama was played out across online developer communities for the years leading up to that win (and some after it, because, let's face it, some people are just sore losers). BUT - if you're not a developer, and you don't follow any of those communities, this may very well be news. After all, it's a new file format - so what?! ... If you're not a developer, if you just use Office to get your work done, why would you care about the technology behind your documents?

Well, I'm glad you asked ...

For advanced Office users, Open XML is the best thing to happen to Office since VBA ... and in some ways, it's even more important. So, if you can create great documents, make Excel charts dance, and make PowerPoint presentations that don't look like PowerPoint -- but you don't own Visual Studio, are not really sure what .Net actually is, and, if pressed, would probably say that C# is a musical term ... then this post is for you ...

So, what can you, the advanced user, really do?

- You can see and understand virtually everything that is stored in your document.
- You can troubleshoot documents more efficiently
- You can edit and format many aspects of documents, or groups of documents, more quickly and easily than from within Word, Excel, or PowerPoint
- You can extend and customize Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with such things as including a custom Ribbon in any document, template, or add-in; creating custom document themes, and creating custom SmartArt graphics...

... and then, of course, ...

...there is the fact that so much of what you can do in Office 2007 documents is enabled by Open XML ... from cross-Office capabilities like document themes and the new graphics engine to advances in the dynamic nature of documents with functionality like Word building blocks and content controls...

Why advanced users?

If you are a software trainer, tech support professional, document production professional, or the go-to Office guru in your department, and you have any influence over more basic Office users - please DON'T send them into the XML. An end user never has to see or even know that Open XML is involved in their documents in order to do everything they need to get their work done. Just as it would be irresponsible to tell a basic user to write a macro in order to do something they can do from within the Office programs using the Ribbon or a keyboard shortcut - telling a basic user to go into the code behind their documents isn't going to do anyone any favors.

But, if you are an advanced user, knowledgeable about Word, Excel, and/or PowerPoint and able to confidently execute it's functionality to an advanced level (such as creating complex tables or working with field codes in Word ... creating nested functions and complex charts in Excel ... or customizing layouts and masters in PowerPoint) ... then Open XML just may be your new best friend. In fact, you may be amazed at how easy it can be.

For years I've recommended VBA as an essential tool for advanced users of Office - and many people - including some of those users and a lot of professional developers - have responded as if I was crazy. VBA is programming - OMG! - why would an end user ever want to go there? Why would anyone want them to?

Well - if something that normally takes you hours could take a few minutes ... if something you didn't think Office could do actually turned out to not only be possible but to be easy ... would that be crazy? Of course not. That's VBA - a language that advanced end users can master far more quickly than professional developers who don't know Office well - because much of the language is developed from the features you already know.

Personally, I would find Office far less usable without the Immediate Window - it is probably the Office feature I use most often. (For those who have never ventured into the VBA editor in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the Immediate Window is a pane that lets you run one line of code to quickly execute a task or get information from a document.)

Well, as much as I - like many advanced users - have become dependent upon VBA to do my job properly ... I do have a new favorite thing in Office. With Open XML, I can understand my documents and the programs behind them to a level that I never could before. When you know how the software 'thinks' you can much more easily understand and interact with it.

So a few more examples to answer the question 'why advanced users?' ...

- With Open XML, there's no more wondering what potentially private information you may be sharing with your document - because you can know conclusively what is and is not there.
- Customization that you thought Office 2007 couldn't do ... such as setting the reflection on a graphic object to somehting other than one of the preset gallery options or creating a complete set of custom theme effects ... can actually be easy.
- And when I say that you can save time on many types of editing tasks ... what if, for example, without actually editing a single line of XML code - just by understanding the Open XML structure behind your document - you could do the following ...

Say that you have an image, such as a logo, that appears dozens of times throughout a document. You get a new logo and have to replace it before the document can go out. Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of pasting, placing, and formatting that image dozens of times ... you could just paste it once - just once - and Word would know everywhere to place it and retain all of the formatting information from the previous logo? Well, it can. That's the power of Open XML for the advanced user.

Do you need to buy software to do any of this?

The short answer is no, you almost certainly already have everything you need. Professional developers work with Open XML using professional developer tools, but you don't need them to do anything that I've mentioned in this post. You can edit Open XML in a simple text editor (such as Windows Notepad or Apple's Text Edit), you can view it in Internet Explorer (some other Web browsers will try to process the XML instead of displaying it), and once you understand a bit of XML structure, you can use free utilities to work with it more easily - such as the free structured XML editor from Microsoft called XML Notepad 2007 (that's a Windows-compatible tool, by the way).

In fact, once you understand the structure of the Open XML behind your Office documents, you can actually create a document entirely from scratch using nothing but a text editor and any ZIP compression utility that doesn't require you to extract files in order to access them (so - for example - the built-in compression tools that come with Windows will do the trick, but the archive utility that comes with the Mac OS will not).

Then, how do I get started?

Like all things new, start with the foundation. Every Open XML Format file is actually a compressed set of files and folders. Once you understand that structure (if you're already an advanced Office user, it will be easy) you'll have a much better time of things when you dive in.

There are lots of sources to get started. Many of them are targeted to developers, but not all - and even some that are targeted to developers are quite easy for us mortals to understand.

You can check out some of my content for options that are targeted to advanced users, including:

- If you have my Office 2007 book, Advanced Documents Inside Out, you have pretty detailed primers on Open XML
and VBA written for advanced users. Click my books here or in the navigation pane on this blog for more info on the book, including a look at the TOC.

- Check out the first in a series of (free) courses I'm writing for Office Online Training about Open XML (Exploring the Open XML File Formats) - this one is an introductory walk-through of the Open XML structure behind your documents. The second in the series - which includes several basic Open XML editing tasks - will be published soon ... and the third (most likely available in a couple of months) will be on the basics of customizing the Ribbon.

- Watch a webcast ... I've given webcasts on Open XML basics (and VBA basics, in case you're looking for that as well) ... here is a recent series of three ...

Advanced Tips & Tricks: Breaking Into Your Office Open XML Format Documents
Advanced Tips and Tricks: Using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Every Day Is Easier Than You Think
Advanced Tips and Tricks: Customizing the Ribbon Using Office Open XML

... and if you've got at least some comfort level with Open XML and you're open to venturing into developer territory (they don't check membership cards :) ... here are some of my favorite resources:

- Probably the single most valuable tool to me when I was learning Open XML was a walk-through of the file format that included creating a Word document from scratch - from the marvelous Erika Ehrli, who is the manager of the Office Developer Center on MSDN ... The article is nearly two years old, and still one of the best on the subject - it's a great place to start Walkthrough: Word 2007 XML Format

- There are a tremendous amount of wonderful tools and information on the Office Developer Center about Open XML - most of it is geared toward professional developers and developer tools, but once you get comfortable with the basics, you may want to explore what's there and pick and choose for yourself.

- OpenXMLdeveloper.org is for all things Open XML. Again, it's definitely written by and for developers - but once you have the fundamentals down, when you're looking for an answer to something you're working on - you may be surprised at how much you can find here.

- How about going straight to the source? There are many bloggers and other online resources about Open XML. Some of my favorites to follow are folks who helped design Office Open XML, worked on the standards process, or continue to work on Open XML for Office (or a combination of these) ... check out blogs from the talented and charming Doug Mahugh and Brian Jones for starters and then take a look at the blogs they read for more expert resources.

© 2004-2006 Stephanie Krieger | Click to Contact | Syndicate this site | Powered by Movable Type
Design by Michelle Jones