Interview by Philip Plimmer: November 10, 2009
Interview with Johann Granados the creator of Open XML PowerTools on all things Open XML, his interests and Costa Rica!
 
What is the coolest implementation of Open XML that you have seen?
We are developers, so I would say that one of the coolest implementations of Open XML is the SDK. I believe that it provides you, as a developer, a great object model to work with to create Open XML based solutions very quickly and easily. I would say that this is a great tool, a great implementation for Open XML.
 
Do you use the new SDK 2.0 or the old one?
We use the new one. We are using the latest community technology preview, and we think that is great.  The old one is great too. The new one has a lot of improvements and it’s a lot easier to work with. I think that it’s just great; they are doing a awesome job with the new version.  
 
Where do you seek help with your Open XML development?
First thing I do, is search on the Internet to see if there are other people with the same problem.  I usually check different blogs from people like Brian Jones and Eric White at Microsoft. I think that Brian and Eric’s blogs are very resourceful and you can find a lot of very useful information on Open XML development. 
Of course, I also use the openxmldeveloper.org website, which is also nice. The open forums are also great.  There are some other different blogs from other people, but most of the time I usually check Eric White and Brian Jones blogs as well as openxmldeveloper.org website.
 
Do you use the Specifications?
Yes, of course, we also check the specification.  We prefer to do searches on blogs first, because the specification is great, but it’s a little big. 
 
Big aren’t they? I agree, they can be hard to work with.
Yes. Sometimes you spend a lot of time there, and it’s nice because you can learn a lot of things about the specification, but we prefer to do searches on the internet first.  If we cannot find the information we are looking for, then we check out the specification.  Most of the time we get the answer through blogs or via the specification.
 
Do you still do work with old Office Binary formats or is everything Open XML?
Right now, basically, every piece of code for document generation we create is based on Open XML. We used to work with Binary and we did a lot of things with the old Binary, but right now we are only working on solutions based in Open XML.
 
Do you find that different or better?
Yes, of course, we prefer working with Open XML one hundred percent over working with Binary.  I don’t mean that Binary is necessarily bad, but with Open XML, because it is open, you have access to the specification. You have full and  complete control with what you are developing.

For example, if you are working with Open XML SDK and there are some missing features, you can go to the specification and learn how to implement those features by yourself.  But when you were working with the old Binary File Format, if the feature wasn’t there you had to wait until Microsoft or some other third party created that feature for you. Sometimes, the feature was never created.

The specification is open, it’s great. You have complete control with what you are creating, and of course you are working with XML, which is basically working with structured text files. If you have any Visual Studio, or .NET platform or any programming tool where you can create XML or .zip files, then you can create an Open XML document.
 
What is the coolest thing you or your company have built in Open XML?
There are two applications that are really cool.

The first one is called Open XML PowerTools which you can download from the Codeplex site. Go to www.codeplex.com/powertools and you can download the source code. It is basically a set of commandlets for PowerShell for creating and modifying Open Xml documents.
 
I actually meant to ask what you and your company have been creating for your customers?
We created this application working together with Microsoft.  We created the first version for them. Right now there is just a set of tools to maintain with Eric White’s team at Microsoft.  But we created the first version of the tool for them. We used this implementation to create, for example, a documentation tool for the VM Ware platform so you can create different reports from the VM Ware virtualization platform using the Open XML PowerTools.

The other cool application we have created is an Open XML based reporting framework.  We created this framework for a big software development company in New York. They provide their customers financial software applications and they wanted the clients to create reports, and to open these reports and modify them in Microsoft Word. 

So basically we created a framework based in Open XML so they can define templates, and based on these templates they can create documents fulfilled with information coming from the backend.  I think this is a really cool application we have created with Open XML.
What do you do in your personal time, apart from developing cool software, in Costa Rica?
I really like to spend time with my family, especially my little one, she is three years old. I also like to read books, and see movies and watch TV series; mostly science fiction based movies or TV programs. I really like that.
 
That sounds like the rest of us!  It’s been really great talking with you.  Thank you.