Excel OpenXML

I have this habit of capturing screenshots and saving them in Excel for later discussion. Excel seems to retain the format much better than Word and I can share it as one file with the tabs arranged sequentially and yea I use Snagit too, but for the sake of illustration, let use Excel.

Let’s assume you have a Similar Excel file with lots of images and would like to get to it quickly. On windows…

• Go to the folder where you have the Excel workbook.
• Make a copy of the Original file (just copy, right click and paste into the same folder, we will rename it in a bit)
• Change the extension of the file to .Zip (You may have to follow the Instruction here to show/hide extensions)
• Right Click and “Extract All” to a folder
• Now open the new folder where you unzipped the contents and navigate to xl\media sub folder.
• All the images should be here

The same principle works for Powerpoint files also. What is this Magic? Since Office 2007, Microsoft has adopted the OpenXML Standard. All of the assets that form part of an Excel Workbook is actually a compressed Folder.

The OpenXML SDK is pretty cool from a programming standpoint. Creating Office files using a layer of abstraction without  having to work with XML or if you so desire to work with XML directly. Checkout “DocumentFormat.OpenXml” in Visual Studio and wikipedia here.

I had to get here for a different purpose, that is to identify a bug in a piece of code, but that’s for another article to follow.