During the first half of 2007, trainers from Microsoft, Sonata, InfoSupport, Allette, Predeek Consulting and others delivered Open XML developer workshops in over 30 countries.  These workshops were all structured around a set of inter-related presentations and hands-on labs that cover typical Open XML development scenarios.

Those presentations and hands-on labs (as well as all supporting content, such as demo files) are now available for free download from OpenXMLDeveloper.org at the links below.

These files have been updated for the Open XML SDK 2.0.

To view the full article with links to Hands-on Labs click here.

Zeyad Rajabi on Open XML SDK 2.0 launch.

Video is available here.

 

As the Open XML SDK is not available for Silverlight developers, Chris Klug set out to create a tiny library with few pre-built features that was flexible and easy to modify and extend.

 

This sample aims to show how to use this library to create Word documents as well as how to extend it to support new features. It will also show how the existing library can create simple Word documents with text and styles, as well as how you can add support for features that are missing. In this case I will focus on how to implement support for headers and footers.

 

To view the full article click here.

There are two new Open XML videos available.  To view them click the links below:

Julien Chable has been working on an open-source API project that would give Java developers a tool for rapid development of Open XML solutions. To view the video click here.

Wouter Van Vugt is the architect of Package Explorer, and Doug Mahugh sat down with Wouter in Building 20 recently to discuss the status of the program and see a demonstration of some of its recently added new functionality. If you're doing Open XML development, this utility is a must-have for your Open XML toolbox! To view the video click here.

Eduardo Ramos discusses a Project for the Spanish National Research Council.

The Project deliverable was an application that could generate dynamic reports in Microsoft Office Open XML from the data gathered for its 2009 Action Plan using a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) platform.

Click here to read the full article.

Chris Auld of Intergen and MedRecruit interviews Zeyad Rajabi, the Open XML document format program manager within the Microsoft Office division. Video is available here.

Building your own Mail Merge application with Open XML SDK 2.0. 

Here is another take on mail merge automation inside an application. If you want to program an application to generate documents from your data then you don't want to automate Word to do this on your server. While there are excellent tools for this purpose such as at www.aspose.com, this new sample shows an approach that can work in simple situations if you are using Open XML. It uses standard Mail Merge field codes that can be created inside Word. Now you can create an test your mail merge in Word, but then generate the documents directly from a database application. Note that for more complex mail merge scenarios you’d probably want to code XSLT as in earlier sample posted here. The sample is a simple Customer acknowledgement screen that creates and opens a customised letter in Word.

Click here to read the article in full.