Office Documents - Using XQuery with ODF & OOXML

A key benefit of ODF and OOXML for developers is the reuse of existing standards

Marc Van Cappellen is a Director of Development at DataDirect Technologies. Marc has more than 15 years of experience in various data access technologies including ODBC, JDBC, ADO, XQJ, SQL and XQuery.

Over the past year we have seen office documents -- spreadsheets, wordprocessing documents, and the like -- taking a more prominent role in business processes, workflows, and vertical applications. While office documents have always been common place, their proprietary binary formats have made them all but unusable to businesses which have sought to integrate office documents in their processes. New office document standards like the OpenDocument Format(ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML), however, are making office document integration in business processes a reality.

A key benefit of ODF and OOXML for developers is the reuse of existing standards -- in essence, your office documents are XML documents, which makes available a complete palette of tools for manipulating these documents and the information they contain. Using tools and technologies available today, you can transform office documents to HTML or PDF, store them in an XML database, shred their information and store it in a relation databases, embed SOAP messages, enrich them with external information, and so on.

Read the full article: XQuery Your Office Documents