Welcome to the Open XML SDK for Office

This content set provides documentation and guidance for the strongly-typed classes in the Open XML SDK for Office.

The SDK is built on the System.IO.Packaging API and provides strongly-typed classes to manipulate documents that adhere to the Office Open XML File Formats specification. The Office Open XML File Formats specification is an open, international, ECMA-376, 5th Edition and ISO/IEC 29500 standard. The Open XML file formats are useful for developers because they are an open standard and are based on well-known technologies: ZIP and XML.

The Open XML SDK simplifies the task of manipulating Open XML packages and the underlying Open XML schema elements within a package. The Open XML SDK encapsulates many common tasks that developers perform on Open XML packages, so that you can perform complex operations with just a few lines of code.

Portions of ISO/IEC 29500:20081 are referenced in the SDK.

Note

Interested in developing solutions that extend the Office experience across multiple platforms? Check out the new Office Add-ins model. Office Add-ins have a small footprint compared to VSTO Add-ins and solutions, and you can build them by using almost any web programming technology, such as HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, and XML.

In this section

Working with packages

Migrating from previous versions

See also

1© ISO/IEC2900:2008. This material is reproduced from ISO/IEC 29500:2008 with permission of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) on behalf of ISO.