in the first post on this topic, I referred to one of the steps required in assimilating information in unstructured or semi-structured environments, such as a typical professional in enterprise or government, or a busy consultant, or... just about anyone.
this step was "Conversion" or getting the data in a "container" from the format in which it arrived to a format that you can use.
Often this step is implicit, but you should never underestimate the cognitive overhead in making mental conversions of apparently obvious, but heavily formatted or structured info (or the opportunities for error that this step introduces).
the most common "containers" for semi-structured information are MsOffice documents (word docs, spreadsheets and powerpoint packs) together with the mass of Html floating around. Xml perhaps too in the various open document flavours becoming more prevalent.
So in this discussion, I neglected to quote one of my favourite bloggers on this topic, Joel Spolsky, who wrote a blog a couple of years ago about the complexity (and up until then, the secrecy) of the MsOffice document formats.
Amongst other things, he touched on the various strategies for accessing information in Office document containers. I quote:
"Let Office do the heavy work for you. Word and Excel have extremely complete object models, available via COM Automation, which allow you to programmatically do anything. In many situations, you are better off reusing the code inside Office rather than trying to reimplement it. Here are a few examples."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
the reason that I wanted to quote this passage (apart from a teaser into a very interesting article from Joel), is that it summarises one of our objectives with the OfficeSheet and other products:
Our objective is to be the most integrated, easy to use, and comprehensive access point into the MsOffice applications and (via the app) the information in the MsOffice document containers.
Why do this when there are literally thousands of MsOffice add-ins available? And probably millions of articles, posts and blogs about VBA programming techniques, VSTO and other programming tools that interface to MsOffice via the COM Automation interfaces?
Well, the answer is both in the question, and the subject of another post.......
