Office Open XML (OOXML)

What is Office Open XML?

Office Open XML or OOXML is an Ecma standard which can be used to represent word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It was originally developed by Microsoft, and was released in Office 2007 onwards. A Microsoft office open xml document is signified by the x on the end of the extension, for example docx for a word document (traditionally doc) or xlsx for an excel spreadsheet (traditionally xls). 

These Microsoft office documents are actually a packaged compressed file containing all the OOXML files to represent the document. With your file compression utility you can open to view, or extract the files from the files. Or even more simply, you can rename the file to have a zip extension and then just double click to view its contents

What can I use Office Open XML for?

Actually, OOXML is very useful. It can be used to create new, edit existing, or for extracting data from documents. You could setup a word document template and use it in a mail merge type scenario pragmatically, or you could extract data out of an excel spreadsheet to be then used for other purposes.

But can't I already do all that in other ways?

There are of course many ways to solve a problem, but Office Open XML provides a simple approach to achieve all of these aims through a single technology. Automation is of course one other way, but you can suffer DLL hell when different clients have different versions of office, and as well as the fact that Microsoft does not advise to use Office automation in server applications. You can of course use Jet/Ace OLEDB to access excel spreadsheets, but this of course doesn't work with other document types.

By using Office Open XML you have a standard flexible and safe way in which to access and manipulate all aspects of Office documents. There is much more support for dealing with XML, and there are many ways in which you can use it.