![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
Designing SmartDocuments in Office 2003:
-
Office 2003 can help solve such problems. Office 2003 supports an XML representation of content, so you can treat an entire Word document as a well-formed XML document. XML alleviates the problem of dealing with proprietary formats by letting you author templates based on XML schema (XSD). The XML content can then be filled in through automation, from databases, or Web services, or through data entry directly by users. In either case, the goal is that you can subsequently use the predefined schema to access the content of those documents, searching, altering, or retrieving any defined content within them using standard XML processing techniques.
Microsoft's "Smart Document" concept provides considerable flexibility to achieve this goal. It makes documents context-sensitive based on the schema definitions, letting you create rich, client interactive applications, and produces output in a standard XML form that you can repurpose as needed.
