Standards and Tech meeting point

Combining the technologies of PowerShell and Open XML, PowerTools for Open XML is a powerful and convenient way to do server-side document processing. By using PowerTools in you own PS scripts you can manage and generate Word and Excel documents !

PowerTools was already available for several months but Eric White and some talented guys worked hard to bring you PowerTools for Open XML v1.1 with two new cmdlets. Thanks to Bob McClellan and people at Staff Dot Net !

Here’s the newly available cmdlets in PowerTools for Open XML 1.1:

• Merge-OpenXmlDocument : this cmdlet is great, it merge multiple source documents into a new document, remove Paragraphs, move Styles and Fonts to a merged document,
• Select-OpenXmlString : this cmdlet can split a document into multiple documents, extract text of a document and  find documents.

To use PowerTool, you need to install the assembly before :

• 32-bits system :
  • Install : c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe OpenXml.PowerTools.dll
  • Uninstall : c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe -u OpenXml.PowerTools.dll
• 64-bits system :
  • Install : c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe OpenXml.PowerTools.dll
  • Uninstall : c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\installutil.exe -u OpenXml.PowerTools.dll

You can find the source code on Codeplex and the binaries here (x86 and x64). I hope that my installers will be ready soon - still need some additional tests - to make them available on this page as well. Stay tuned !

If like me you own an iPhone as well as Google Apps account, I think you already tried to use the new iPhone sync feature for your calendars and contacts. If it perfectly works for standard GMail account, that’s not the case by default for Google Apps users.

Actually, your administrator has to activate the ‘Enable Google Sync’ option in the mobile section of your dashboard, otherwise it won’t work. OK, so what when the mobile service is not present in your dashboard ? Let’s solve this together.

The first step is to go in the Domain Settings of your dashboard and then to check the Next generation option of the Control Panel setting :

The Mobile service must be visible and let you specified the Google Sync option for your users :

Now, users have to follow the steps described in here to sync their calendar and contacts with Google Apps. This little trick made me lost a couple of hours …

After reading this post by Doug Mahugh, I tried some investigating on my own, wondering if I could find other interesting results. After spending some time without any success I finally found two tests that I wish to share with you :

Rotated text in a table cell

Here’s a table with the text of the header columns within a table rotated in OOo Writer (normally a feature uses often when creating a report that shows a lot of data or similar document to accommodate the space requirements of the columns).

Here’s the same table opened in Symphony :

Notice that the text of the header columns are not rotated (nor the header rows) which produces a table more difficult to read.

Here’s how I did that :

1. 1. Create a new blank document in Writer
   2. Create a table with 16 columns and 5 rows
   3. Place your data into the table
   4. Select the first row, right-click on the selected row, then select Table from the context menu
   5. Select the Text Flow tab, then choose the Right-to-left (vertical) option from the Text direction drop-down menu
   6. Select the first row and do the same (right-click, choose table, change Text direction to Right-to-left)
   7. Save the document
   8. Open this document in Lotus Symphony

Symbol Shapes

Create a new blank presentation in OOo Impress (v2.4.1) and add a smiley face symbol :

Then open it in Lotus Symphony :

What do you think it is? A smiley? Maybe you can imagine it’s a Bowling ball in the gutter (personnaly, my Bowling record is 165 points so no gutter for me :p).

How I did that ?

1. Create a new blank presentation in OOo Impress
2. Click the down arrow for Symbol Shapes (at the bottom of the screen) and select the Smiley Face symbol shape
   
3. Click on the presentation and drag to create a new smiley face symbol shape on the slide
4. Save the document
5. Open this document in Lotus Symphony

The idea behind these tests isn’t to tell you that OpenOffice .org or Symphony are bad implementations of ODF ; or that ODF is not sufficiently described in its  own specs. These tests are not those kinds of tests. If you read my last post concerning the ODF Implementation Notes release or the summary of my participation during the DDI event in Brussels, you may know that I love and trust the fact that if software companies exchange documentation, the software will be better tomorrow. The idea with these tests is just to highlight the fact that open standards are a very good point for the software market, but it’s not enough to allow developers to build compatible implementations. Indeed, we need two kind of documentation for software to be compatible with each other : specifications and implementation details. That’s exactly what Microsoft did several weeks ago by releasing the ODF Implementation Notes (and yesterday, by publishing Open XML ECMA-376 Implementation Notes!). Several years ago, I thought this was exactly the kind of documentation that Microsoft will never provide. Apparently, I was wrong ! Moreover Microsoft is the first to do it (except if you consider that source code is documentation!). Companies need to document their implementation, especially if it concerns open standards!