LiveMeeting – Use Office 2007 to create a FlowDocument

A couple months ago I hacked together a quick prototype that converts a Microsoft Word Document to FlowDocument.  It uses XSLT to convert the Word ‘Open XML’ to the FlowDocument XAML.  The prototype is very rough and I never finished it.  I have it on my task list , but it hasn’t moved very high on my list.

Better Version

Michael S. Scherotter, a developer evangelist at Microsoft, finished his Word to FlowDocument converter.  The source code isn’t released yet but he has scheduled a LiveMeeting on November 29th 11:00 AM to show you this new tool.  It it implemented as a Office Ribbon Add-in and he will release the source code after the 29th.

Details about the show

This is great news.  The flow document API in WPF is a excellent way to create and show good looking documents.  Unfortunately there isn’t any good WSYWIG editing tools to create your flow documents.  If it is easier for customer to use Word to write and save flow docs then we are more likely to see them in use.  I hope Microsoft takes this Add-in and does a ‘LiveWriter‘ on it (put some resources behind it to make a releasable product).

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