Office and Open XML: now available in 7 languages

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Don Campbell beat me to it, but this is so good I want to mention it too: MSDN's Erika Ehrli has posted an interactive version of the Developer Map for the 2007 Microsoft Office System poster that she has been putting together. It's three things in one: a well-organized visual overview of the Office developer landscape, a tool for learning more (try clicking on a section you're interested in), and an example of the great looking graphics you can easily create in PowerPoint 2007. It's also a great example of Erika's talent for simplifying complex topics.

And speaking of MSDN, there's a great article in this month's MSDN Magazine by my good buddy Ted Pattison on "Server-Side Generation of Word 2007 Docs." The article covers how to create a Word document from scratch on a web server, using the System.IO.Packaging API. As usual with Ted's material, it's straightforward and to the point -- Ted is another one of those people who can make complex subjects sound simple.

By the way: as of this month's issue, MSDN Magazine is now available in 7 languages! For example, Ted and I made a few friends during our trip to Brazil for an Office "12" Ascend training event this spring, and they can read Ted's article in their native Portugese right here.

The basic concept is that you can append "?loc=XX" to the URL of a page on MSDN Magazine to get it in the language you'd like, where XX is one of the following codes:

  • en = English
  • fr = French
  • es = Spanish
  • de = German
  • ru = Russian
  • pt = Portugese
  • zh = Chinese

How cool is that? More languages are planned for the future. Just for old-timers like me and Robert Hess, I'm hoping they support FO=Fortran soon. :-)