Introduction to Word documents

re: Introduction to Word documents

Tate, Jeffrey T. — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 01:12:01 GMT

Great information.

So are you tellling us that if a table will "live" in the document, we should start with the Table Style first and format in the order illustrated above? Is there harm when a Paragrah style is applies to a cell?

Again, great information!

Jeffrey

re: Introduction to Word documents

Ian Easson — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 01:30:05 GMT

Now that the external (XML) representation of styles has been rationalized, does that mean that their internal representation (data structures) have been similarly rationalized? By that, I mean will Word 12 no longer suffer from the endless corruption of styles (particularly list styles) that all previous versions of Word are prone to due to the inadequate styles data structures?

re: Introduction to Word documents

Chris Nahr — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 12:26:47 GMT

Ian's question is mine as well. The main reason I'm using Word only for other people's documents (and FrameMaker for my own) is Word's chronic lack of reliability. Ribbons or not, I'll not bother to upgrade unless the internal document structure has been fixed.

re: Introduction to Word documents

Bryan Wilhite — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 23:22:36 GMT

So Word 12 doc's are broken up into XML modules. Does this affect what we had in Office 2003 VBA? Will these modules be aggregated into a single XML property such that Range.XML() remains unchanged?

re: Introduction to Word documents

Tristan Davis — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 01:54:47 GMT

Bryan: We're definitely not changing the result of Range.XML this release - it will continue to return WordprocessingML that matches the Word 2003 XML schemas. There will also be a method to return an XML serialized version of the new file format, whose schemas are different.

Catching up on my Reading

billtrippe.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:01:47 GMT

I have had a crazy week, so am just now catching up on some of my blog reading. A few things worth reading:Brian Jones has a nice introduction to using styles with the XML underlying Microsoft WordEd Dodds did some...

re: Introduction to Word documents

Daniello — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 01:06:53 GMT

Only a question: Will be MathML natively supported in Microsoft Word 12?

re: Introduction to Word documents

nchamp — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 17:38:53 GMT

All great stuff.

Can I request for a further article information on how the different files fit together in a package, especially the customXML stuff? I've worked out (I think) the four places where the name of the xml data files is defined and referenced, but I'm interested in hearing it from the horses mouth, so to speak. I'd also like to see an example with more than one xml datastore in the package (and with more meaningful names than item1.xml, too!)

Thanks in advance

re: Introduction to Word documents

Terry Grignon — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:25:20 GMT

Very interesting... wish I was in the beta crowd too!

A question on Word and XML and datafiles which I didn't see touched on. Word 11 can take in data for a merge from a wide variety of formats including CSV, RTF, straight from a database, etc... but not XML. Will Word 12 import XML data directly? Without the need for ASP or other work arounds?

Thanks for the intriguing look at Word internals.

re: Introduction to Word documents

Daniel Schierbeck — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:22:16 GMT

I'm curious here: why do you use the `w' prefix for attributes on elements that are already in the namespace referred to by `w'?

<foo:bar foo:bur="..."/>

is exactly the same as

<foo:bar bur="..."/>

though obviously shorter. Do you use a real namespace-aware parser, or are the prefixes just mapped statically, i.e. the namespace name doesn't mean anything to the parser, only the prefix does? While harmless, it seems a bit unprofessional.

This is not just a problem with Office, OpenOffice does the same when saving files in the OpenDocument format.

re: Introduction to Word documents

Randy Brown — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 02:35:11 GMT

I currently use XML Schemas in Word XML files that I create in Word. I then use these files as templates from within my ASP.NET applications to load the XML into a DOM, cycle the XML Schema elements, and infuse SQL data into the document to produce tailored Word Documents and save to Disk as Word XML files.

I now have the need to save these Word XML files as PDF files and cannot find a good tool to do this programmatically from the ASP.NET application. If you know of a third party tool that can perform this operation, I'd love to know what it is.

But my real question is will there be a way with all the new features of XML and PDF functionality to perform the task above in a easier fashion AND have the ability to Save the Word XML to a PDF programmatically?

Thanks in advance, keep up the good work!

re: Introduction to Word documents

Johan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 15:46:24 GMT

XML formats aside; will the new Office version provide a COHERENT AND UNDERSTANDABLE system for Paragraph Formats?

In current Word versions, different documents behave very differently, depening on if "Automatically update paragraph format" is active or not, and it appears there are also some other mysterious configuration options. I have not found a sure way to change a paragraph format and have the change applied to all paragraphs of that type.

The result has been confusing the hell out of users, and extremely few people seem able to master the MS Word paragraph format complexity, not to mention the "art" of creating a table-of-contents based on headings.

FrameMaker got this right 10+ years ago!!

In my opinion, MS Word needs a redesign for USABILITY. Adding more features is NOT the answer.

re: Introduction to Word documents

Jay V — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:51:01 GMT

Hey Brian.

Good stuff, but one of the things that I haven't seen mentioned yet is Word's OfficeArt. Currently, Word seems to still use vml to describe autoshapes and vector objects, while Excel and PowerPoint both leverage the new OfficeArt schemas. Is Word planning to continue using vml, or will this eventually be changed before the final release so that even Word uses oartml?

Thanks, and my condolences regarding the super bowl. Maybe next year, buddy.

re: Introduction to Word documents

BrianJones — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:08:55 GMT

Thanks for all the comments everyone. Sorry for not replying sooner. I was down in Cupertino for Ecma meetings when I made this post, and then I was on vacation last week. In between I had to suffer through the Super Bowl...

Jeffrey,
You can only apply a paragraph style directly to a paragraph, not to a cell, or table style. A table style can specify that every paragraph within a specific cell, row, column should have certain paragraph properties assigned, but not the style.

Ian,
This is just the physical representation of the styles on disk. The internal style behavior is not directly affected. That said, there is some work that has been done to make working with styles easier (but I'm not sure if it will affect the problem you are talking about).

Daniello,
You will be able to copy and paste using MathML, but the XML persistence in the file format will be a bit different from MathML. We'll also provide transforms for going between the two.

nchamp,
I'll try to pull together an example with more than one datastore file. The short of it is that all you need to do is create a relationship to the XML part you want to use as a datastore item (and give it the right relationship type). You don't need to reference it directly anywhere (unless you want to create a mapping or something).

Terry,
There aren't really any changes being made to the types of sources allowed for a Mail Merge.

Daniel,
This is a discussion we've had internally a number of times. When we had first made the decision to do this back with SpreadsheetML in Office XP (about 7 years ago), it was because it looked like the best way to go. With the XML parsers we were using, if you asked for the namespace of an attribute, it would just return null if you didn't qualify the attributes. Of course you could go an look at the parent element to figure out the namespace, but it seemed easier just specifying it on the attribute.
Now, looking back on it, it might have been nicer to go the other way, but it wasn't that big of a deal.
In answer to your question about using a namespace aware parser though, we definitely do that. You can change the prefixes if you want and we'll still properly parse the files (assuming you've made the proper namespace declaration for that new prefix).

Randy,
There are a few tools out there that go from WordprocessingML to XSL-FO. From there you can go to PDF. I've blogged about a couple of them, and I'll try to dig into some more.

Johan,
The "automatically update paragraph format" is really something that only a template author should use. It's extremely confusing for any end user, and that's why it isn't on by default for any of the styles or templates we ship. Unfortunately there isn't a Word blog out there right now, but if you've seen the Beta, you'll notice that there are a large number of improvements to Styles, Tables or Contents, and other pieces of functionality that we've seen people have trouble with. We are very aware of the usability issues (just look at Jensen's blog to get an idea of all the work we do there: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/)

Jay,
It was a great year anyway (although that game was about as painful of a game as I've watched in a while).
Word will still use VML for most shapes. For new diagrams, charts, and pictures it will use the newer drawingML.

-Brian

re: Introduction to Word documents

FARfetched — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:36:39 GMT

Aside from Ian's and Chris's question(s) about stability and corruption issues, which chased me away from Word after 12 productive years, I have a specific question about your the "The quick brown fox." example under "Story Content."

In the source XML, I noticed that there were no explicit spaces between the individual text runs... yet the italic text run has spaces on either side in the display. If that example is correct, how do you express an example like "do not do this yet." where an italicized "yet" abuts the plain-text period immediately following?

I once learned (the hard way) that trailing spaces in RTF are significant, so I'm not assuming anything....

re: Introduction to Word documents

BrianJones — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 22:59:12 GMT

Well, in the WordprocessingML, it would be more like this:

<r>
<t xml:space='preserve'>do not do this </t>
</r>
<r><rPr></rPr>
<t>yet</t>
</r>
<r>
<t>.</t>
</r>

Notice that on the first text node, it specifies that leading and trailing space should be preserved. If that wasn't there, then when you opened the file "this" and "yet" would have appeared as one word (where the 2nd part is italicized).

-Brian

re: Introduction to Word documents

Randy Brown — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 17:52:40 GMT

Hey Brian, thanks for keeping up with the posts.

I just got off yet ANOTHER contract where the client was wanting to produce data infused documents and send out as PDFs. They also need to have the ability to alter the document template as business needs dictate. Not sure about others, but I'm finding this requirement on just about every workflow related project that I get involved with lately.

Word's ability to work with custom XML schemas is awesome for programmatically infusing data into word templates stored on disk. Unfortunately, the lack of programmatically going from WordML to PDF is preventing the above scenario from becoming a reality. It forces us to scour the web looking for the final piece to the puzzle. So far I have found only one solution that claims to do the convertion of WordML to PDF but it is cost prohibitive ($1600 which is ridiculous in my opinion, at 4 times the cost of Word itself).

You mentioned going from WordML to XSL-FO, and then to PDF. Could you elaborate on this, and what all is need to go from WordML - to XSL-FO - to PDF? Also, if I'm barking up the wrong tree and you're not the one to talk to about generating PDF's from WordML (programmatically from .Net apps) then let me know. I looked through Cindy blog (now defunct) and the other guys, and have seen my same question asked several times by others, but have yet to see any quality answers on the topic.

If MS recognizes the importance of embedding PDF generation into the entire Office suite, then I would think that they would recognize the importance of exposing this same functionaly to developers for workflow related applications.

If there was a specific blog on this topic, I would be willing to bet that there would be substantial interest.

Thanks a lot for your time and comments.

re: Introduction to Word documents

Ian Bradbury — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 17:02:00 GMT

Brian, Please can you tell me. Will the ability to add my own custom xml tags be available across the whole Office 12 range?

Or just the professional set (as is currently)?

I would like to use custom xml tags to define business structures and then process that xml "in document" via some custom code.

re: Introduction to Word documents

BrianJones — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 01:28:36 GMT

Hey Ian, it will be available in all SKUs: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/09/20/472146.aspx

-Brian

re: Introduction to Word documents

Shane Wilson — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 21:58:57 GMT

Hey Brian;

I have a xml doc. I have a dotx template with embedded custom xml using a predefined xsd. Now I want to create a new document by merging the xml and the dotx to create a docx that ultimately will be PDF'ed. The question is - or am I just dumb - how do I get the xml merged with the template?

Learning about Open XML on-line

OpenXML Developer — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:26:45 GMT

Links to blog posts that contain useful technical information for developers. Open XML is a new standard, but there's some good information already available if you know where to look.

Evans Thompson’s Take on Tech » Blog Archive » Word Document Structure Explained

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 19:08:58 GMT

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Evans Thompson’s Take on Tech » Blog Archive » Word Document Structure Explained

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re: Introduction to Word documents

Andrew — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:12:01 GMT

Is there any XSL to convert WordML to RTF?

Please?

With image support would be nice......

WordprocessingML Document Model

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:25:27 GMT

I thought it might be worthwhile to give a bit of an overview of the WordprocessingML model that you

WordprocessingML Document Model

Noticias externas — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:10:56 GMT

I thought it might be worthwhile to give a bit of an overview of the WordprocessingML model that you

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