Why I love the new file format in Office 12

davewebster — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:53:00 GMT

You may have read about the new file format in Office 12. It is based on a zip file that contains separate XML ‘parts’. When I first saw this I nearly fell of my chair. Let me explain.

A few years ago while working in MCS in New England I worked on a gig for an insurance ISV in Connecticut. The application I was building basically had to print letters to remind policy holders to renew their Professional Liability insurance. Well this was in 1998 and the only really safe way to do this was to automate Word. This of course meant that you could not run the app on the server – Oh NO! Automating Word on the server is a definite no-no. As soon as a dialog box pops up your app is toast. So the app was run by hand by an employee as the last job in the afternoon before going home. In the morning there would be a bundle of Word docs ready to print.

What a hack!

I thought about opening the binary and doing a grep of strings in the binary. Fortunately I asked a colleague to slap me hard before I went ahead and did that. Then I looked at using bookmarks and the rest but that was too slow and complicated. So instead I put placeholder text throughout the template files. These were strings like xyzzyName, xyzzyAddress and so forth. Then I automated Winword to replace strings with elements I had in a data set.

I told you it was a hack.

The process took several hours taking a minute or two per document. Well now I can imagine doing this in Office12.

· First I would use a custom XML binding in the zip file of the docx.

· Then I would look open the zip using winfx

· Next stream in the row of a dataset into the customXML folder in the zip.

· And… well that’s it really. Just close the stream and you have a word document. If you feel like it you could do this on Linux.

I really can’t justify the time to try this out now - you can’t forever have ‘do-overs’of the messy things you have done in your life. Still I expect that it would take about 100ms to perform this job per document on a fast box. And it can be done on the server. Think about it real server side processing of Word documents!

Office 12

davewebster — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:36:00 GMT

Hey folks I have a new title. Program Manager for Offfice 12 Evangelism EMEA. Now this does not mean I am abandoning my work in ASP.Net but I have taken on the role for the next version of Office. This involves the being the somewhat grandely named Editor-in-chief of the BetaExperience newsletter. You can sign up for your own copy to be emailed fresh to your inbox every month b y going to http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/nlarchive/bexp2/issue_1/newsletter.html

Anyway I am including a series of interviews with senior Microsoft people associated with Office 12. I started by interviewing Richard McAniff and this interview will be available later this month. Well I set up the video camera and we talked for about an hour. Richard gave me a cool insight into what it is like to work on the Office team. You know when you meet someone that really loves what they do? Well Richard is one of those people. After the interview we talked about rock climbing for another hour.

I love my job.

I will keep you posted about Office 12 as we go along.

Dave Webster's WebLog : Office 12

Why I love the new file format in Office 12

Office 12