Altova's XMLSpy adds OpenXML support

Stephen McGibbon — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:44:00 GMT

Another TechED OpenXML related announcement

Altova XMLSpy Now Supports New ECMA Office Open XML File Formats
June 4, 2007; 05:51 AM

Altova ( http://www.altova.com ), creator of XMLSpy and other leading XML, data management, UML, and Web services tools, today announced exclusive support for the ECMA Office Open XML File Formats – the new open standards utilized by the 2007 Microsoft Office system – in XMLSpy 2007 Release 3. With support for the ECMA formats, XMLSpy users can extract, edit, query, and transform XML data from within Microsoft Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Office Excel 2007 documents. XMLSpy provides full validation of data in the Open XML file type, intelligent entry helpers, and support for the development of XSLT and XQuery transformations for publishing or utilizing the data in other applications.

Open XML is an ECMA International industry standard and is the new default document format for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Open XML files are zipped archives containing document content according to the standard's defined XML dialect. For more information on the ECMA Open XML file formats, please visit: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm

“Organizations save vast amounts of information in Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, but until now, that content could not be re-used in an extensible, programmatic way,” said Tim Hale, Director of Marketing for Altova. “Thanks to the Open XML document formats, however, that data is now standards-based; and the new capabilities in XMLSpy make it highly interoperable and easy to process, providing huge advantages to business people and application developers.”
"Altova XMLSpy 2007 is the first XML development tool we know of that allows developers to extract, edit, query, and transform XML data from within documents that use Office Open XML Formats – the new file type used by the 2007 Microsoft Office release,” said Joe Marini, Group Manager of the Visual Studio Industry Partners program at Microsoft Corp. “This gives XMLSpy users a head start in developing applications that utilize and process content in what is sure to be the predominant business data format."
XMLSpy 2007: Support for 2007 Microsoft Office system
Altova XMLSpy is the world’s best-selling XML editor and the industry standard XML development environment for modeling, editing, transforming, and debugging XML-related technologies. With support for the Open XML Formats in XMLSpy 2007r3, users can, for example:

Create an XSLT 2.0 transformation to publish data in Microsoft Office Word 2007 or Excel 2007 documents for use on the Web or a corporate intranet
Use XQuery to extract and aggregate financial data from Microsoft Office Excel 2007 documents into an XML form for mapping to Web services, EDI messages, etc
Manually edit Open XML data and then save it back to a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document to test the outcome of changes that will be made in an application under development

To learn more about how XMLSpy 2007 works with Microsoft Office documents visit Altova’s Microsoft Office feature page at: http://www.altova.com/features_office_2007.html
For more information on all the capabilities of Altova XMLSpy 2007, visit: http://www.altova.com/products/xmlspy/xml_editor.html
In addition to extracting and processing Office Open XML data in XMLSpy, developers can use the royalty-free AltovaXML™ engine to access data from 2007 Microsoft Office documents and execute XSLT and XQuery transformations on it in their own applications. AltovaXML is currently the only XSLT/XQuery processing engine that provides the ability to repurpose and re-use the vast amount of user data being created in the 2007 Microsoft Office release.

Altova engineers are giving live product demonstrations at TechEd 2007 this week. I also noted with interest that Altova

has headquarters in Massachusetts and Vienna, Austria;
say virtually every Fortune 500 company uses their products;
is an active member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Object Management Group (OMG) and is committed to delivering standards-based platform-independent solutions that are powerful, affordable, and easy to use.

Another tool that makes it easier for developers to use and be more productive wit OpenXML.

Notes2Self.net : Tech•Ed, Document Formats

Microsoft SDK for OpenXML formats - June 2007 Technology Preview

Altova's XMLSpy adds OpenXML support