Separate Yet Equal

re: Separate Yet Equal

Stefan KZVB — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:09:52 GMT

I'm happy you start writing more about XML solutions in Word as I'm evaluating possibilities to migrate existing Word 2000 VBA solutions to XML with Word 2007! Could you please add some dynamically repeating data elements like a list of people or items to your upcoming examples? Is that easily possible with content controls?

Btw unexpectedly I'm not getting on with the problem that the .dotm in Word 2007's start folder is write-protected when you try to save changes to it. It's only write-protected when it's located on a network folder, on C: this works fine. Of course I'm the only one who uses the network folder in my tests. As written I first thought this might be a problem with the server virus scanner so we excluded Word's start folder from scanning. But that did not help. Could you please confirm this issue or do you have any hint how to make this work?

The power of data-view separation in your documents

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:02:53 GMT

There is an excellent post over on the Word team blog that goes into details on how the new content controls

Learning about content controls

Doug Mahugh — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 23:58:40 GMT

Tristan Davis has a great post over on the Word team blog about working with content controls and binding

re: Separate Yet Equal

Mike G — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:38:12 GMT

Great post - thanks. Like Stefan, I'd also be really interested in finding out how to handle repeating data in the underlying XML using the content controls, if it's possible.

re: Separate Yet Equal

Rajesh Khatri — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:57:21 GMT

Hi,

One query please.

I had followed the same approach as you have mentioned.

oCustomXMLPart = ActiveDocument.CustomXMLParts.Add

oCustomXMLPart.Load ("c:\MyData.xml")

When I made changes in the document and saved, changes were not reflected in "c:\MyData.xml". When I rename .docx to .zip and then unzipo it, i can see the files item2.xml with the changes made.

Is this supposed to be like this only OR "c:\MyData.xml" should also reflect the changes? If i need this modified xml file for further business processes, how can I get the changes?

Please help me to understand it better.

Regards,

Rajesh Khatri

re: Separate Yet Equal

Mick — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:40:32 GMT

excellent post

I too would like to see how far you guys can go with content binding

It's really awesome !!

re: Separate Yet Equal

Jefta — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:41:33 GMT

I just recently hooked on this blog. Excelent posts i read so far.

Perhaps I missed some earlier posts but is there also a more userfriedly solution for this? I mean you do not want to expain XPath and the word objectmodel to all word users that need solutions like these, do you?

re: Separate Yet Equal

Brian Rookard — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:30:23 GMT

I too have some questions about how you can create a sort of merge document from an XML file.

I can create a merge document using an XSLT stylesheet in OpenOffice. This allows me to take a raw xml file and apply an XSLT stylesheet to the data so that it will open in OpenOffice in the pre-formatted style according to the stylesheet I opened it with.

So, I guess my question about Microsoft Word is: can you create XSLT templates to effectively create merge documents?

From the questions I see, it seems that what people want to do is to take a large XML file and create a merge document from it (which is what I want to know how to do in Microsoft Word).

re: Separate Yet Equal

wrdblog — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:11:26 GMT

Thanks everyone for taking the time to read my post. Let me try to respond to each of the questions I got in the thread:

1 - Stefan and Mike, great question about repeating content. We didn't get to it as a native operation in Word 2007, but there are ways you can do it by manipulating the Open XML file format. Definitely something I'll talk about in the future.

2 - Rajesh, once you load the file into Word, you're correct that we only modify the version of the custom XML that's part of the document. However, you can easily extract that file using the .NET Framework 3.0 System.IO.Packaging API for further processing.

3 - Jefta, we definitely don't see setting this up as an end user task - more of something done by a template creator, at which point the users of the template don't know/care about the fact that there are XML mappings in the file. In terms of tools, VSTOv3 will have native support for this in its UI.

4 - Brian, you can definitely use XSLT (in fact, you can do that in Word 2003 as well), but this model is much cleaner in my opinion. All you have to do is swap out the data and the document automatically updates, so creating the template is literally creating the Word template vs. authoring a potentially complex XSLT (which is much harder for most users).

- Tristan

Mapping Magic

The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:54:21 GMT

XML Mapping with Content Controls in Word Quick intro: My name is Travis Ratnam. I'm a program manager

re: Separate Yet Equal

Shar — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:29:07 GMT

Just want to thank you all for every question and answer, My poor little paper clip fellow is kept scratching his head as I try to learn if

that is possible...Thanks again

Open XML blogging in 2007

Doug Mahugh — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 05:39:44 GMT

It's been quite a year for those who have been blogging about the Open XML file formats. Here's a look

Open XML blogging in 2007

Noticias externas — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 06:11:24 GMT

It's been quite a year for those who have been blogging about the Open XML file formats. Here's

Open XML SDK session at TechEd

Doug Mahugh — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:27:52 GMT

This afternoon at TechEd, Zeyad Rajabi demonstrated some of the ways developers can use the Open XML

Taking Advantage of Bound Content Controls

Brian Jones: Office Extensibility — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:10:00 GMT

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a good holiday. For my first post of the New Year I want to talk