Welcome to the Open XML SDK 2.5 for Office

This content set provides documentation and guidance for the strongly-typed classes in the Open XML SDK 2.5 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, Second 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 2.5 simplifies the task of manipulating Open XML packages and the underlying Open XML schema elements within a package. The Open XML SDK 2.5 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

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.