How much has Open XML caught on? [closed]

Answer 1

I am doing the scenario that sales performance for a country is delivered in PPT Deck using Open XML

Answer 2

Libraries like Simple OOXML can also greatly help with the learning curve.

Answer 3

We migrated from Word Interop to Open XML very recently.

Our application is used for creating Invoices in the Word and pdf format. When Interop was used, a decent size Invoice took about 5-10 minutes to generate. Now, using OpenXML and SSRS that time has been reduced to approximately 30 seconds. The only problem area with Word was that some features were not backward compatible from Word 2010 to 2007 and that took some time to fix and get up and running. Like creating the Table of Contents, merging documents etc.

Other than that, I think Linq, MSDN and Eric White's Blog is enough to get you going in the right direction.

Answer 4

I have used Open Xml SDK for document generation in SharePoint, PPTX generation for custom presentations (pulling from XSLX for the data) and for "building" composite documents from multiple document segments.

The format and the SDK are great. No worries on the server in ASP.NET or SharePoint scenarios, and great speed. I have not found too many scenarios where the SDK or "brute force" xml cannot accomplish a goal. One instance is password protection and DRM for documents, but these are more corner cases. I would agree with aaronaught that this is not an exclusive solution, but SharePoint, VSTO and others are tools in the tool belt for document generation solutions.

Answer 5

Now that Microsoft Office 2007 (and especially Excel) support Open XML, I'm finding it far easier to work with than Office Automation. A few major reasons for this are:

• Better performance;
• No flakey IPC issues (i.e. somebody left Excel open at the Save As dialog, crash);
• No dependency on Office itself, or any external components whatsoever;
• Fairly easy to write Linq extensions and queries against in C#;
• Can be used in server environments without any problems or risks.

Given that Office XP/2003 users can open Office 2007 files with the Compatibility Pack, I don't see any reason to continue using the old automation or "OfficeML" methods. It's a bit of a learning curve, but it's arguably the best option today - it's free, it's reliable, and best of all it's the native format used by Office 2007 today and you don't need any stupid tricks to get it to work (like attaching the XLS content-type to HTML as we did for XL2003, and having XL2007 complain about an incorrect extension).

I wouldn't say it's an outright replacement for VBA/VSTO - the thing about those is that they're usually part of a solution where the requirement is to integrate with the Office environment itself. Using OOXML would generally require you to write an entire application around it. But for simple import/export, which is probably what 90% of automation has been used for in the past, definitely, OOXML is the way to go.

Answer 6

I looked at this technology a lot, I program in VBA, but it was way way to complex for my needs. There are some great things about using it that my elearning would benefit from, like Linq and XML, but the bar for going from VBA to the underlying formats is just too high and I don't have the luxury of the kind of time and money it would take investing in learning VS.Net and Open Office XML formats.

But the one thing I think it would really help with is meta-tagging PowerPoint content for an LMS.