The document discusses Office Open XML, the file format used in Microsoft Office 2007. It provides an overview of OOXML, including its structure as a zip file containing XML files for different content types like documents, spreadsheets, presentations. It also discusses OpenOffice.org's implementation of an OOXML importer through a native filter being developed jointly with Novell. The filter uses a fast SAX parser and works within OpenOffice.org's data model to handle the different OOXML document types.

1. Office Open XML: a technical approach for OOo OOoCon 2007, Barcelona, September 21st, 2007 Hubert FIguiere Software Engineer, OpenOffice.org Novell - hfiguiere@novell.com

2. Getting Started

3. What is Office Open XML? An office application file format XML based Created by Microsoft... ...for Microsoft Office 2007 ECMA standard 376 Proposed to ISO

4. What Office Open XML is not? Office Open XML is not OpenDocument (ISO 26300) ... nor the previous XML formats for Microsoft Office introduced in the last few MS-Office release ... nor an ISO standard though it has been proposed

5. Why supporting Open XML? Support = importing from (and/or exporting to) For interoperability reasons with Microsoft Office 2007

6. Overview of the format

7. The specification Available to anybody as ECMA standard 376 5 PDF documents Fundamentals Open Packaging Conventions Primer Markup Language Reference Markup Compatibility and Extensibility 173 + 129 + 472 + 5129 + 43 = 5946 pages

8. The specification (cont.) Some have printed it. OpenXML printed spec photo by Pavel Janik photo by Pavel Janik http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2007/05/19/T20_32_07/

9. “Packaging Conventions” A zip file: “Open Package” Contain the main content... ... and the embedded content Same container used for other Microsoft format like XPS Replace the old OLE structured storage In principle similar to OpenDocument, but not really.

10. Content DrawingML Diagrams, Charts, etc. WordprocessingML Word document SpreadsheetML Excel document PresentationML PowerPoint presentation Heavily relies on DrawingML

11. Content (cont.) Relationships Maps embedded objects Set the relationships between fragments

12. Content (cont.) VML Legacy format from Office 2000 Embedded objects Sound files Images Can be anything ! I have seen some PowerPoint document with an OpenDocument chart in an OLE container that was referenced from a slide

13. OpenOffice implementation

14. Plans Implement a native filter for Office Open XML Import (in progress) Export (Novell is committed to do it) Split in 2 modules Target is tentatively 2.4 Novell's “ooo-build” 2.3 has it: Ship with openSUSE 10.3 Will ship with other Linux distros

15. Joint effort between Sun and Novell

16. “ [...] a team of 5 developers will implement 25 handlers a week, which means that we'd have all the XML handlers written in 44 weeks. [...] Nevertheless, we’ve taken a little less than a year to get the converters reading the new file format.” [...] This is just for Word.” -- Rick Schaut, Mac Office team, about implementing the Office 2007 importer for Word for Mac, December 2006. http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2006/12/07/open-xml-converters-for-mac-office.aspx

17. Microsoft released the beta version of the Word 2007 to RTF converter for MacOS in May 2007...

18. ...and PowerPoint support was released July 31 st 2007

19. Modules Writerfilter Word import Refactoring of the RTF and binary doc filter See Fridrich Strba presentation for all the details OOX Excel and PowerPoint, but not Word CWS xmlfilter02 implements VML as well called by the writerfilter if needed.

20. No XSLT OOX is not an XSLT based filter. Process XML to input into OpenOffice.org internal model Written in C++

21. The fast SAX parser 5568 tokens are listed in our code String comparisons for tokens are slow The fast SAX parser is designed to reduce the number of string comparisons by using a 32-bits hash for string tokens (including the xml namespace) offer that API through UNO It lives in the sax module Off course it is generic and could be used anywhere

22. Fast parser details Hash tokens are generated by gperf at compile time From a compile time generated list (OOX) Each know string token is referenced by a const like XML_token XML namespace in the high order bits of token Allow selecting the namespace with a simple bit-mask

23. Example switch( aToken ) { case NMSP_DRAWINGML|XML_lnSpc: break; case NMSP_DRAWINGML|XML_spcBef: break; case NMSP_DRAWINGML|XML_spcAft: break; default: }

24. API The OOX module only depend on UNO API Can't always get inspiration from the binary filters that mostly use the internal APIs Some UNO API are incomplete or missing They need to be implemented

25. The data model The Office Open XML data model is somewhat very close to the one from the binary format

26. “ [...] XLSX may be ugly, but its concepts were very familiar from XLS. We already had much of the code required to handle it.” -- Jody Goldberg about Gnumeric Excel 2007 support, http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/

27. Excel vs Calc Excel 2007 has more feature difference than Calc Dealing with missing features in Calc: Find a workaround “Downgrade” the data Problem with round-trip conversions Implement the missing feature

28. Excel 2007 vs Excel 2003 No notable new feature into the core Overall structures are very similar shared string table that contains cell string Sheet protection options data contain the identical set of options. Autofilter uses internal cell range names (not visible to the user) that are identical both in xlsx and xls.

29. Excel 2007 vs Excel 2003 (cont.) Overall structures are very similar (cont.) In both xls and xlsx formats, pivot table record contains a cached source data. Excel allows rich text and field objects in the header and footer, and they are encoded. In both xls and xlsx, the same encoding scheme is used.

30. PowerPoint vs Impress Pixel perfect rendering People spend hours in airport to refine their “PowerPoint”... ...so the import has to be perfect SmartArt This is a big feature in PowerPoint 2007 Animation / transition Both based on SMIL

31. PowerPoint 2007 vs PowerPoint 2003 Not much changes SmartArt Saving in PowerPoint 2007 as binary PPT makes it an embedded OLE Off course this require having the engine

32. DrawingML A shared ML Used directly by PresentationML Encountered in WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML documents. Defines styles, shapes, text, charts, diagrams, audio/video, etc Supposed to be more functional than VML, therefore to replace it.

33. VML Legacy Microsoft XML format Still generated by 2007 version if MS applications Replace the binary EMF for OLE Used by annotations in Excel and a lot of drawing features in Word supposed to be superseded by DrawingML

34. Alternative Implementations

35. odf-converter (Free Software) Microsoft sponsored ODF to Office OpenXML converter XSLT based Written in C# / .Net Also runs with Mono (Free Software platform) Free Software (MIT style license) Currently shipped by Novell for SUSE and Windows

36. GNOME (Free Software) libgsf Implement OpenPackage reading and writing Gnumeric Import .xlsx files Export .xlsx files (somewhat) AbiWord Import .docx Both run on non-GNOME platforms like Windows

37. “ The initial importer was written on the flight to London for the ECMA meeting, and export was added on the flight back. Toss in a few hours of debugging and the sample file [...] was under a week of effort to read and write.” -- Jody Goldberg about Gnumeric Excel 2007 support, http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/

38. Apple iWork '08 (non-Free) Pages Import and export .docx Numbers Import and export .xlsx Keynote Import and export .pptx

39. Questions?

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