Eric and I made a number of significant design and organizational changes to PowerTools. This video briefly goes through the technical details of those changes. It will be most useful for people familiar with C# development. It also helps if you know...

This post introduces the second screen-cast in this series on getting started with Open XML development. In this screen-cast, I introduce the three most important tools that you will want to be familiar with: Return to the Table of Contents of this screen...

I have some happy news! Bob McClellan will be joining us as an admin here on OXD – answering questions on the forums, writing blog posts, recording screen-casts, and more. Bob has worked with Open XML for several years. At one point, he wrote an...

This blog post introduces the first in a series of screen-casts that are specifically for a developer starting development with Open XML for the first time. It is a project that I've been meaning to work on for some time, and I recently received the...

The Set-OpenXmlString cmdlet enables interesting functionality - you can do a search-and-replace of content without automating Word, and you can search-and-replace in many documents at once. The Set-OpenXmlString can search-and-replace in both WordprocessingML...

We’re very happy to announce the release of PowerTools for Open XML version 2.2, now available for download at powertools.codeplex.com . There are a number of great features in this new release: Merge-OpenXmlDocument incorporates DocumentBuilder...

Congratulations are due to the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee for the approval of OASIS ODF 1.2. As a document format geek, I follow the progress of all document format standards efforts, including ODF, and I’m very happy to see this new...

Using custom XML parts and content controls, we can create smarter documents that provide needed functionality for users. Content controls and custom XML parts enable us to integrate business data with content in a document. In addition, content controls...

A question was recently posed to me - what is the best way to look at markup and the rendering of the markup simultaneously. This is important, for instance, when you are experimenting with markup and determining the exact markup that you want to generate...

The default approach to working with DocumentBuilder 2.0 enables you to take bits and pieces of multiple documents and assemble them together into a new document. However, there is an interesting scenario that this approach does not handle. You may want...

Three years ago Peter O'Kelly wrote a paper titled, "What?s Up, .DOC? Open XML Formats, OpenDocument Format, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications." This paper was an industry debate about the relative merits of Open XML Formats and OpenDocument Format and the significance of the productivity application market shift from binary and proprietary file formats to vendor- and product-independent XML models. In the paper he makes a number of projections about the market. Three years later he returns to analyze his predictions and the current market. ...

In a previous screen-cast , I showed how to retrieve the text of an OpenXML WordprocessingML document. In this post and screen-cast, I introduce some code that enables you to replace the text of a bookmark. This blog post and screen-cast build on the...

Sometimes developers use bookmarks to delineate text in an OpenXML WordprocessingML document. Then, as part of a larger system, they want to retrieve the text of that bookmark to process in some fashion. Retrieving the text of bookmarks is made somewhat...

I had thought that there were only going to be four screen-casts in this series on adding / updating tables-of-contents in OpenXML WordprocessingML documents. However, I can see that there are now going to be at least six. In the screen-cast that I present...

Here is the last of four screen-casts on tables-of-contents in OpenXML WordprocessingML documents. In this screen-cast, I show how to use Word Automation Services to repaginate a document and update the TOC. Here is the complete list of screen-casts in...

I recently received a question about the use of the glossary document. In a nutshell, in DOCX, it is used for the placeholder text for content controls. In DOTX, it is used for the content for quick parts. The following 3 minute video demonstrates these...

Here is a short screen-cast that explains what DocumentBuilder 2.0 is all about, in less than seven minutes.

When sending a presentation to customers or others outside of your organization, you often want to remove speaker notes. It is easy enough to use PowerPoint automation to remove the speaker notes , but if you are processing presentations server-side,...

In the first screen-cast in this series, I examined the markup for tables-of-contents in WordprocessingML documents. In the second screen-cast, I presented a bit of code that showed how to insert a non-updated TOC into a document, and to set the <w...

Many Open XML developers need to generate documents, and then generate and insert an updated table-of-contents for the document. TOC's in Open XML are not hard, but they require a bit of explanation. This post introduces the second in a series of...

Many Open XML developers need to generate documents, and then generate and insert an updated table-of-content for the document. TOC's in Open XML are not hard, but they require a bit of explanation. This blog post introduces the first of several screen...

Recently I wrote some code that implemented search-and-replace for Open XML WordprocessingML documents . I wrote that code for an Open XML developer who needed to implement that functionality using XML DOM, although with a different language than C#....

When working with SpreadsheetML, one of the most common needs is to retrieve the data from a worksheet or a table in as easy a fashion as possible. There has been a fair amount written for C# developers to do this, but not nearly as much for VB.NET. Some...

This post is the third in a series of three screen-casts that introduce DocumentBuilder 2.0. This screen-cast builds on the previous two screen-casts where I walk through the process of transferring comments from multiple source documents into a destination...

This post is the second in a series of three screen-casts that introduce DocumentBuilder 2.0. This screen-cast builds on the previous screen-cast where I walk through the process of transferring comments from multiple source documents into a destination...