Data/View Separation in Word 2007

In this screencast, Office program manager Brian Jones shows how to use content controls, data binding, and the custom XML data store to push/pull data to/from a Word 2007 document.

Microsoft has adopted the Office Open XML file format, as the new default file format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 to reduce file size, improve reliability, guarantee long term accessibility for archiving, and enhance interoperability with business solutions.

A key piece of the integrating the contents of Office documents with business data is the ability to structure those documents semantically. Word 2007 builds on top of the custom defined schema support introduced in Word 2003 and offers an extremely robust way to structure the contents of a document.

In addition to allowing the solution builder to structure a Word template, they can then map those structures to their own custom XML schemas which allows the developers to program directly against the data rather than against the application’s object model. This allows for much simpler and more reliable solutions than in the past, and even allows the valuable contents within the documents to maintain a direct mapping to business data without writing any code.