Recently in Office 2007 Category

Microsoft has now released documentation for the Office binary formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) in addition to kicking off the project for an open source binary to Open XML converter (.doc to .docx)   The threw in WMF for good measure.

The translator is great for anyone going to Open XML or those who want to work on XML-based documents.  It’s also cool to see what’s actually in the binary file format.

I recently found myself with a couple hundred vCards I needed in Outlook 2007.  Sadly, Outlook wants you to either import them individually or Save and Close each one.  Thankfully, there's a workaround.  I'm doing this with Vista and Office 2007.  I don't have my XP/2003 setup in front of me right now, so I can't test it.  But here's what you do:

1) Open Windows Contacts

2) Click Import

3) Select vCard (VCF file)

4) Select all the contacts to import, then click Open.  Let it do its thing.  OK.  So, now they're in Windows Contacts, and Outlook know how to import contacts from here.

5) Switch to Outlook.

6) Choose File, then Import and Export.

7) Choose "Import Internet Mail and Addresses", then click OK

8) Select Outlook Express...or Windows Mail.  Uncheck Import Mail.

9) Click Next.

10) Decide how you want to handle duplicates, then click Finish.

Voila!

I've been playing with Office 2007 for work.  However, my updated contact info is in OS X!  It should be simple enough to export the contacts as vCards and import them into Outlook as contacts, right?  Well...sorta...

Address Book thinks it's pretty cool to export all the contacts as one vCard.  (It's part of the 3.0 spec, I think.)  Outlook does not like that one bit.  It wants one vCard per person, please.

Being the lazy person that I am, I knew there had to be a better way to do it.  Google turned up some great choices, but they all involved me spending money for the functionality.  I'm about as cheap as I am lazy, so I kept searching.  If only there was a way to automate the process...

Automator to the rescue! I whipped up a quick workflow to export all cards as individual vCards into a folder on the desktop called vCards.  In an effort to spread my laziness, you can download the workflow.

Here's a quick rundown of what it does:

1) Creates a folder on the Desktop called vCards.
2) Finds all contacts where the name is not "" (not null).
3) Export all cards individually.

Voila!

Of course, if you want the vCards saved elsewhere, you can change that part in Automator.  For those that want to go with the flow, there's also an Application in the ZIP file.

Enjoy!

Im a little late in this one, but I realized it’s a little harder to create OpenXML documents (like Word 2007) that I thought. While it’s still really easy to parse the actual XML code, you then have to ZIP it all with the right “stories” etc. Yuck!

Technorati Tags: office, xml

I missed this awhile back I think (it was actually about one year ago). Jensen Harris has a great post on customizing the Ribbon.

Technorati Tags: office, xml

OpenXML Community Growing:

• Older versions of Office - As you all know, folks who have older versions of Office can download a free update that allows them to read and write the open xml formats. While the downloads have only been available for about 6 months, they are already the 2nd most popular download on Microsoft.com (second only to IE 7). There are well over 4 million downloads to date.
  ET: These work pretty well. They don’t work with some DMSes currently. Both Hummingbird and OpenText are working on versions compatible with them.

• OpenOffice - Thanks to Novell, you can read and write the OpenXML formats with OpenOffice. The Sun folks are also involved as they move from the XSLT approach to a more native support.
  ET: OpenOffice is a cool alternative to MS Office, but it’s still not as polished. Of course, free can go a long way to make up for that.

• WordPerfect - Corel has announced support for OpenXML in an upcoming release of their office suite.

• Palm OS - Documents To Go brings OpenXML support to smartphone and PDA devices powered by the Palm operating system.

• Mac - NeoOffice brings OpenXML support to the mac.
  ET: As great as NeoOffice is in many ways, it is slow and not as pretty as other Mac apps.

• MindMapping - Mindjet’s MindManager allows you to follow the logical workflow of first brainstorming, then creating a document outline, and then writing you document. You can brainstorm your idea in MindManager, and then convert those into a wordProcessingML document.

• OpenXML Writer - The folks up at OpenXML.biz have build a free open source text editor called “OpenXML Writer” that allows you to edit WordprocessingML files.

• Gnumeric - Gnumeric is an open source spreadsheet application that was one of the first applications out there to show support for SpreadsheetML.

• Web Development (PHP) - There is an open source project up on codeplex where they are creating a set of PHP classes which allow you to read and write SpreadsheetML files.

• Java Developers - There is a project up on sourceforge where they are creating a set of Java APIs to make programming against the openxml formats much easier for Java developers.

• Data Reporting - In Monarch V.9.0 from Datawatch you have the ability to create reports of your data using SpreadsheetML.

• XML to PDF - Altsoft XML2PDF server 2007 supports the import of WordprocessingML files.

• Word and Character Counting on Mac - Word Counter 2.2.1 is an application for Mac OS X, and it supports a variety of file formats, including WordprocessingML

• Convert docx to simple html - The docx converter allows you to transform WordprocessingML documents into either plain text or simple html directly from their website.

From BrianJones

Step by step: Configure the 2007 Office system for a hard disk image

TechNet has a good article on how to use the OCT for Office 2007 install.  This takes the place of the Custom Installation Wizard found in previous Office Resource Kits (ORK).

Jensen Harris breaks out information on the new “gallery filters” featured in Office 2007 (more information on the new gallery control can be found here). His example is the new, much more robust Equation tool.  It’s a very cool way to handle groups of related items.

The gallery is a major component of the new Office 2007 UI.  I love the graphical, touchy-feely, WYSIWYG approach for many tasks, and I love the fact it’s so “live.”  It is a major shift from the current UI, and, like the task pane, will definitely require an adjustment to the way we work with Office and train end-users.

By going the all-XML approach, Microsoft has made it much easier to understand the structure of Word documents and how the various “stories” and elements interact.  Brian Jones has an excellent post about the basics of the Word document structure and then goes further by showing how that structure translates into the Open XML format.  Things are so much easier now, assuming good document production processes and good document formatting.  It also looks like it’ll be easier to “fix” malformed documents.  This will hopefully lead to a number of quality tools that are less expensive than solutions from Microsystems or Levit & James.

Yes, this is really old news, but here it is anyway.

Once Office 2007 is released, Corel will add support for Open XML to the next version of Wordperfect.

From Brian Jones: Open XML Formats