Embedded Data Islands and Application Manifests in Office Documents Saved as XML

In a Microsoft Office 2003 document that conforms to the WordprocessingML (also known as WordML) or Excel XML spreadsheet (also known as Excel XMLSS) schema, does Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System, Version 2005 support the embedding of the data island and application manifest when the document is saved as XML?

The answer is yes for WordML and no for Excel XMLSS.

WordML is a full fidelity file format. This means that it preserves the data island and application manifest. If you were to look at the WordML output, the data island and application manifest look like a binary blob (certainly it wouldn’t be something you could safely edit unless you were an expert). When you open WordML in Word, the Visual Studio Tools for Office, Version 2005 runtime talks directly to the data island and application manifest, so this works out fine.

Excel XMLSS is not a full fidelity format. When you save in Excel XMLSS, it removes the data island and application manifest from the document, as well as disassociates from the managed code behind it.

By the way, our server object model operates directly against structured storage, so it won't work against WordML.

Thanks to Eric Carter, Eric Lippert, and Kathleen McGrath for their help with this post.

-- Paul Cornell

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