Open XML Opens Office Document Metadata (without Office)

Microsoft has been releasing a number of Open XML SDK v2 samples on the MSDN Code Gallery in the past few days, samples that interested me professionally, and so wanted to round the up for easy reference.

• Excel 2010: Generating Excel 2010 Workbooks using the Open XML SDK 2.0
• SharePoint 2010- Processing Documents in Bulk Using SharePoint 2010 and Open XML
• Office 2010: Retrieving Cell Values in Excel 2010 Workbooks
• Office 2010- Setting Custom Properties in Word 2010 Documents
• Office 2010- Adding Tables to Word 2010 Documents by Using the Open XML SDK 2.0
• Office 2010- Retrieving Lists of Hidden Rows or Columns in Excel
• Office 2010- Deleting Headers and Footers from Word Documents
• Office 2010- Converting Word 2010 Documents from the DOCM to DOCX File Format
• Office 2010- Retrieving Dictionaries of All Named Ranges in Excel 2010 Workbooks
• Office 2010- Changing the Print Orientation of Word 2010 Documents
• Use Open XML to manipulate images in Word (VBManipulateImagesInWordDocument)
• Use Open XML to manipulate images in Word (CSManipulateImagesInWordDocument)
• Retrieving the Number of Slides from PowerPoint 2010 by Using Open XML SDK 2.0

The key point is that these provide examples of doing things for the old/binary formats, required using Office COM, whereas now we can do it all without installing Office. Just another reason to love the more modern approach taken with the Open XML file format.

Here's an example of one of the above links;

Retrieving Comments from Word 2010 Documents by Using the Open XML SDK 2.0

"The sample provided with this article includes the code necessary to retrieve the XML block that contains all the comments from a Word 2007 (or later) document. The following sections walk you through the code, in explicit detail. When you use the sample code to retrieve the comments, the procedure returns an XML element, named w:comments, which contains the XML block of information from the original document. It's up to you (and your application) to interpret the results of retrieving the comments.

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