re: Open XML and Office Services

I'm Brian Jones — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:14:10 GMT

Hey Jack,

Excel does allow for custom XML markup, but not in the way that you're asking. The two ways of adding "semantics" to the cell is either through the use of named ranges, or the custom XML mapping support. In both cases, the "labels" are stored outside of the grid, and they then reference the cell or range they apply to. Excel will roundtrip this information, and even update the references properly if new rows or columns are added at runtime.

There is no way to tell Excel to not use the shared string table. One option however is to post process the output to move the strings back inline. Should be an easy example to pull together (I'll see if Zeyad or I have some time to give it a shot).

-Brian

re: Open XML and Office Services

jack in Texas — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:48:39 GMT

Brian:

Question. Is it possible (perhaps with proper namespace markup)to add new user tags at the cell level of a sheet in the xl/worksheets/ folder? When I try I, get validation errors, and Excel repairs the sheet's xml file.

I also never heard the answer to the question about preventing Excel from moving string content into the 'shairedStrings.xml' file upon saving, and the difficulty that makes reading/extraction the sheet file data. Easy of reading is more important then compation sometimes.

Thanks.