Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Doug Mahugh pointed me in the direction of an article by David Williams on IT Wire that was posted a couple of days ago. The article takes an objective look at some of the work that has already taken place to make it easier for developers to make use of the Open XML document format regardless of their chosen platform or toolset.

The author takes a look some of the tools that have started to emerge for working with Open XML files in PHP and Java, then explores some of the useful scenarios that arise through the use of these tools on a Linux hosted environment.

From the article;

With technology like that described here, handling OpenXML within Linux is a snap. We’ve mentioned possibilities for small utilities,and we’ve presented code to produce invoices on the fly. For something more substantial consider some real-world possibilities.

A banking example is a commercial bank website allowing its customers the facility to check their current balance and then with a simple click download and open a spreadsheet generated on the fly from the server. This spreadsheet may include all the user’s account data. They may now work with this data and simulate loans or other operations, or sum the interest paid during a financial year or other activities.

Similarly, an energy company might provide opportunity for customers to check electricity consumption and download a dynamically-generated spreadsheet with formulas and customer data which can be merged with data from other sources thus realising an ad-hoc analysis.

For knowledge workers, an OpenXML app might generate presentations on demand from several slide decks stored on a web server. Presentations can be quickly compiled, adding or removing or shuffling slides as required.

David points out in his article that he isn’t advocating the use of Open XML, just taking an objective look at some of the work that is already taking place around the format, which is fair enough.

There is a lot of great work taking place in this area at the moment, and I’m sure there is a lot more to come.