I’ve finished today the new Word 2003 template for dbdesc. This time I’m not going to post the code, instead you can download it from here. However I want to post a summary about the building process of this template.
First of all I know that not many users will use this template because it needs Word 2003 to run. However the goal of building this template was to show you how easy you can transform the xml file produced by dbdesc in whatever format you want or need.
Next version of Microsoft Office will introduce a new default file format based on XML and Microsoft claims that it will be supported by older versions of Office (installing a Service Pack I guess). I will add a new XSL template to dbdesc to support it.
Meanwhile, if you need to produce documents to be viewed in older versions of Word you can use the RTF template included in dbdesc.
Ok, so what are the improvements I’ve made in the Word 2003 template?
- Information related to indexes, foreign keys, views, stored procedures, etc. has been added
- Use of styles to ease formatting
- Better table formatting
- Page headers
- Page numbers
- Automatic index
And remember, if you are going to work with WordML you should…
- Download the XML Office 2003 schemas
- Read the Brian Jones blog
- Use a XML Editor
- Add small chunks of code and test them often with Word
- Let Word show you how to do it
- Use styles
Of course this template will be included in the next version of dbdesc which I plan to release very soon.