Getting Back in the Publishing Groove

It's great to get back into the publishing groove. Most of us over here, in "Office and SharePoint land" have been working for months to also publish Interoperability content to go along our traditional developer offering. You can access that content on MSDN Online, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216514.aspx. So now, we’re back to a full complement of technical articles, book excerpts, and API references. We have quite a mixed bag of content to present this week.

For Office client developers, we have quite a diverse set.This first one will be of interest to folks who are considering how they can integrate or migrate their existing (legacy) Access solutions with Access 2007: Developing Access 2007 Solutions with Native C or C++. This article provides a good overview of the options for choosing the most optimal native data access API .

And then, there are those who like to play with Excel. My father is a CEO for the Las Olas company in South Florida. He occasionally sends me these monster spreadsheets full of data liberally scattered with formulas (usually so I can troubleshoot it for him). I think his IT guy would appreciate this next pair of articles:

Merging Data from Multiple Workbooks into a Summary Workbook in Excel: Microsoft Office Excel MVP Ron de Bruin provides a number of samples and a handy add-in to merge data from multiple workbooks located in one folder into a summary workbook. When you use workbooks that contain multiple worksheets, a common task is to roll up or consolidate the data in each worksheet into a summary worksheet. The samples described in this article add a worksheet to the active workbook and then copy a range of cells from every worksheet to the summary worksheet. The different procedures demonstrate techniques for copying varying size ranges as well as placing the data at specific locations in the summary sheet.
Consolidate Data from Multiple Worksheets into a Summary Worksheet in Excel 2007: Microsoft Office Excel MVP Ron de Bruin provides a number of samples to merge data from multiple worksheets into one summary worksheet. After you have all the data on one worksheet, you can do things such as build a PivotTable report based on your specific criteria or use the filter options in Excel 2007 to get the results you want.

We also have an another SharePoint article, this one about developing workflows, a hot topic for those of us in content publishing: Developing Sequential Workflows for SharePoint Server 2007 Using Visual Studio 2008 by Joel Krist. We have some more workflow content coming out over the next month or so, a visual how-to as well as some other content, so check back if this is something you are hot to know more about.

Continuing in the SharePoint theme, we published two book excerpts from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server MVP Andrew Connell's excellent "Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007". Chatper 14: Authoring Experience Extensibility and Chapter 20: Incorporating ASP.NET 2.0 Applications. You can get the book in its entirity from Wrox.

We published a book chapter for Excel geeks as well, Building Custom Solutions from Beginning Excel Services. You can get the book in its entirity from Wrox.

On the lighter side - for our holiday gift this year, our group all got 80 GB Zunes from Microsoft. This has done a lot for sucking many of us into the wonders of MP3 players. When I brought mine home, my husband promptly ripped all 653 albums we owned. We hooked it up to our stereo receiver and did away with our cassette player, our VCR, and our DVD player. I've inherited the daunting task of keeping our genre categories clean and editing/creating playlists. Apparently Frank Rice, a teammate of mine, found an excuse to play with his Zune during work hours by writing a couple of columns about using Excel to manage his Zune playlists:

Coming up in the next few weeks we have content by Microsoft Office MVP Stephanie Krieger (Using Document Themes with Office Open XML Formats) and a three-part article series by Stephen Peront about Building Server-Side Slide Decks Using Open XML.

-Kelly