Introduction to Microsoft Office Open XML

Learn to retrieve information from and to modify Office documents using Open XML, and the Open XML SDK. You don't need to open a copy of Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to work with the documents. Instead, you can use the Open XML File Formats and the Open XML SDK to write code that interacts with the data in the documents.

Working with data in Microsoft Office documents can be slow and error-prone if you rely on Automation. Starting with Office 2007, Microsoft introduced a new file format, the Open XML File formats, that stores the content of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in an XML-based structured set of folders inside a standard ZIP file. The Open XML File formats are easy to use, easy to view, and far easier to work with than the previous binary formats. The XML content is, however, somewhat daunting to manipulate programmatically, and Microsoft has released the Open XML SDK to make it simpler. This course focuses both on examining and understanding enough about the Open XML File formats to get you started, and shows several examples using the Open XML SDK with each type of supported document. You'll learn to both retrieve and modify data in an example for each type of document. By the time you're done with the course, you'll have a basic understanding of the tools you need, and the locations for finding help.