Excellarate encourages employees to learn and grow in order to be on top of new technologies. A Excellarate employee used his time between clients to solve the issue of analysing, editing and comparing OOXML documents and built a utility called “OOXML Tools”.
Office Open XML (OOXML) is an XML-based file format used for representing word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
OOXML Tools is a Chrome Extension that runs offline. The OOXML Tools utility has a neat ability to drag the OOXML packaged file, view/edit its XML files, then repackage them into OOXML documents. The OOXML Tools can also put two Office documents side by side and compare them part by part.
Challenges & Solutions
One of the daunting tasks for any office productivity team is to view and analyze the OOXML documents in their raw form while the office productivity products are in development. Also, many times while opening and saving these office documents while the product is in development mode, there could be loss of data since the product is not complete or bug free. The developer then has to view and analyse those files to fix the data losses.
Viewing and analyzing packaged XML files is a time consuming and tedious process. The traditional process includes renaming the file extension to .zip, unzipping it and then opening the XML files in a XML viewer to begin to analyze them. In most cases, the developer then – again – has to rename the package back to its original extension so that it could be opened with the office application.
Results
The OOXML Tools for Chrome is built using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. It’s a boon for OOXML developers as it’s both an editor and a debug tool to develop OOXML Office Suite. Its biggest USP is that it can be used offline; and it is of prime importance to the Linux geeks as no such utility exits on Linux platform. The OOXML Tools utility is free to download and available on Chrome as an Extension.
