Excel XML Toolbox for Microsoft Office Excel 2003
Microsoft has just released the Excel XML Toolbox for Microsoft Office Excel 2003 as a free download. I have working with the toolbox long before its release (I know the developers pretty well) and I think that anyone working with Excel's XML features will find this toolbox essential. So much I plan to cover the toolkit in my Tech*Ed presentation entitled “Programming Excel XML Solutions”.
Anyway, here are my favorite features:
- XML Map Reloader: Allows you to refresh the underlying schema for an XML Map without losing cell mappings. (HUGE!)
- Schema Viewer: Let's you view the schema for an XML Map. The coolest use of this is simply opening any XML document in Excel, let Excel infer the XSD for that document, then view/copy the schema to use elsewhere (or with Excel). Turns Excel into a Schema creator.
- Schema Builder: Name says it all... working with Excel but don't have a schema? The toolkit will let you build it in Excel without any knowledge of XSD.
- Refresh Maps with Formula Persist: Allows you to have formulas in mapped cells that do not get erased everytime you refresh the XML data source. This one does sound like a big deal into you need it. When you do need it, you will really appreciate it ;)
- Also you can toggle the blue borders for XML mapped cells on and off using CTRL + SHIFT + X. Sounds like a little feature but was awkward to do before the toolkit. Now Excel has parity with Word on this shortcut.
There's a bunch more too! Great work Chris and Joe!!!!