XML in Office 2003 : Information Sharing with Desktop XML

by Goldfarb, Charles F.; Walmsley, Priscilla

• ISBN13: 9780131421936
• ISBN10: 013142193X
• Format: Paperback w/CD
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr

Summary

-Written by Goldfarb, the inventor of markup language technology, and Walmsley, a leading expert on XML Schema, on which Office 2003's XML features are based.-Ideal for both Office power users and IT developers.-Foreword and cover endorsement by Jean Paoli, Microsoft's Chief XML Architect.

Table of Contents

Preface: What Do You Give the Software That Has Everything? Who is This Book for? How Much XML? About the Products

How to Use This Book

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Microsoft Office XML Architect

Introducing Desktop XML

Desktop XML: The Reason Why

Introductory Discussion

Office before XML

Office Documents as Information Assets

Enterprise Data Integration

Next Stop: the Web

What Next?

XML Concepts for Office Users

Introductory Discussion

Formatting Markup

Generalized Markup

Elements and the Logical Structure

Well-formedness and Validity

XML and the World Wide Web

Namespaces

Other XML Constructs

More on XML

XML in Office

Introductory Discussion

Information Capture and Reuse

End-user Data Connection

Data-driven Application Enhancement

Working with XML in Office

Creating and Editing XML Documents

Word Power User Task

Creating and Using Schemas

Opening a Document

Validation

The XML Structure Task Pane

Working with Attributes

Saving a Document

Combining Documents

Rendering and Presenting XML Documents

Word Power User Task

Word Markup Language (WordML)

Mixing WordML with other vocabularies

Creating WordML with stylesheets

Using External XML Data in Documents

Word Script Developer Task

External XML Documents

SOAP Web Services

Using XML data in spreadsheets

Excel Power User Task

Why Use XML with Excel? The Worldwide Widget Expense Report

Worksheets, Maps and Schemas

Importing and Exporting XML Data

Mapping from an Existing XML Document

Data Analysis

More Complex XML Documents

XMLSS: The Excel XML Vocabulary

Using Web Services with Spreadsheets

Excel Script Developer Task

Analyzing Stock Quotes with a REST Web Service

Currency Conversion with a SOAP Web Service

Other Approaches

The Excel Object Model

Designing and Using Forms

InfoPath Power User Task

Forms on Steroids

Using a Form

Designing a Form

Using Scripts with Forms

InfoPath Script Developer Task

Why Use Scripts? A Simple Sample Script

Script Files and Forms

Events

Launching Script Editor

The InfoPath Object Model

Using Scripts for Validation

Calculations

Inserting XML Nodes

Additional Features

Using Secondary Data Sources with Forms

InfoPath Script Developer Task

Defining a Secondary Data Source

Secondary XML Documents

Databases

SOAP Web Services

Access Databases and XML

Office Power User Task

Why use XML with Access? Our Example Database

Exporting Access tables

Exporting Other objects

Applying a Transform on Export

Importing XML Data

Publishing XML to the Web with FrontPage

Office Power User Task

Why use FrontPage with XML? Web design by Example

Set Up the Website

Choose a Data Source

Create a Data View

Organize the Viewed Data. Format the View

Developing Office XML applications

Office Script Developer Task

Smart Documents

Smart Tags

The Research Pane

XML Expansion Packs and Manifests

XML Tutorials

The XML Language

Friendly Tutorial

Syntactic Details

Prolog vs Instance

The Document Instance

The Prolog

Entities: Breaking Up Is Easy to Do

Character References

Suppressing Markup Recognition

Comments

Processing Instructions

Office Support for the XML Language

Summary

Namespaces

Friendly Tutorial

The Namespaces Solution

XPath Primer

Friendly Tutorial

Location Paths

Addressing Multiple Objects

Children and Descendants

Attributes

Predicates

The XPath Data Model

XSL Transformations (XSLT)

Friendly Tutorial

Transforming vs Rendering

XSLT Stylesheets

Using HTML with XSLT

Rules, Patterns and Templates

Creating a Stylesheet

Top-level Instructions

Variables and Parameters

Parameters

Extending XSLT

Referencing XSLT Stylesheets

Web Services Introduction

Introductory Discussion

Communication Protocols

Amazon.com

Google

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

What do you give the software that has everything? XML, of course! Microsoft Office is the most successful productivity product in the history of computers, with over 300 million users around the world. Few of them use all of the features in Office now, so why add something new? It wasn't just the needs of the information worker that motivated this extraordinary enhancement to Office, it was the needs of the information itself. Thanks to the Internet, local networks, business integration and the very ubiquity of Office, key enterprise data is not available in one convenient place. Some of it is in managed central stores, but much more is in desktop systems, departmental repositories, and even in the systems of vendors and customers. Past versions of Office have provided tools for coping with this problem, but solution implementation has been cumbersome and often required advanced development skills. That was in part because every data source typically has its own data format. In addition to accessing the information, a solution often had to decode it as well. In the past few years, XML has emerged to solve that problem; it has become the universal information interchange representation. XML software for machine-to-machine functions is virtually standard equipment for all platforms. But until September, 2003, the only generally useful XML on the desktop was strictly in specialized products. Common productivity tools like office suites supported only specific XML document types, when they supported XML at all. Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 changed that situation forever, by accepting any user-defined XML document as a first-class citizen. As a result, millions of desktop computers have been transformed from mere word processors into potential rich clients for Web services, editing front-ends for XML content management systems, and portals forXML-based application integration. This book shows you how to use the XML features of Office to realize that potential. You'll learn to share information among Office products and between Office and the rest of the XML universe. XML in Office 2003will make it easier to collaborate with co-workers and utilize the information resources of your enterprise and the Web. Who is this book for? You don't have to be a professional developer to use the Office XML features. We've written this book so that office users who are comfortable with preference settings and macros will be able to tap into these resources. If you can deal with scripts or are willing to copy and modify ours you'll be able to do even more. And if you are a pro, you'll find that we don't talk down to you: you'll easily see the added possibilities for real program code. And XML knowledge isn't a prerequisite for this book either. It includes a bonus section of tutorials on XML and its related technologies, adapted from the best-sellingXML Handbook. How much XML? Chapter 2 of this book is an introduction to XML that should be sufficient for learning the XML features of Office 2003. However, if you plan to use XML products other than Office, develop your own schemas, or use Office to share data with enterprise systems and Web services, you'll want to learn more about XML. As our readers will have differing experience with XML and different requirements for its use, there seemed no sensible way to intersperse detailed XML education with the Office XML tasks that are the focus of the book. Instead we've put the detailed tutorials and references on the XML language and related standards where you can easily find them when you need them. They are in Part Three. The book's Table of Contents and Index can guide you to specific subjects, and we also provide appropr