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I have developed an app solution where customers can update data themselves through XML files. While this is kinda great, it still leaves customers to editing XML files which is probably requiring too much even if they have IT/office people.

So I was wondering. Do you know if OpenOffice or Microsoft Office supplies some kind of standard tool for editing XML files with ease? I am thinking if I define the necessary XML stuff, will I be able to point to a standard office tool allowing them to edit the data?

Maybe a tool where they simply can edit records. Each record with columns where the Office tool will help them select from possible values. That would sufficient. (The reason I am asking explicitly for Office tools is that almost all my customers will have IT people proficient with Office tools.)

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    Neither OpenOffice nor Microsoft Office was designed to be a XML editing tool.
    – Ramhound
    Jun 10, 2013 at 12:05
  • I did some research before posting my question. If you search for e.g. "Open Office open XML calc xslt transform" you can see various convoluted ways of e.g. trasnforiming XML, so it can be imported into Calc. I was hoping perhaps Calc or Excel now came with more functionality compared to the year2005-2008 articles I found. Maybe if someone had already created some XSLT and could confirm if it worked well enough to use as solution. (Also, what I have found deals primarily with import, not export.)
    – Tom
    Jun 10, 2013 at 12:12
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    If you are the app dev I would advise you to provide an interface in your app or via a secondary app to make the necessary changes to the XML using a simple GUI. Even if you provide XML editing tools, there's a high probability people will inadvertently end up messing up your XML structure.
    – Karan
    Jun 10, 2013 at 18:29
  • I kinda agree. But still, would be nice if it was already support by an office tool I could reference to, so the customer did nott have to learn use a new tool.
    – Tom
    Jun 11, 2013 at 10:34
  • This video shows that it is at least easy to import XML into Excel: youtube.com/watch?v=r0S2CQd46C4 (I am unsure if the XML comes with XSD if it is even better, if so, I think that would be sufficient.)
    – Tom
    Jun 11, 2013 at 10:54

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The Microsoft Office InfoPath software is designed for this purpose. It allows XML documents to be designed and presented to users as forms, and the form entries are put into the XML document.

This is not a widely used product, and it pretty much requires that all recipients of the XML document have the software. (It is part of the Office 2013 that is supplied with the Office 365 Small Business Premium subscription and it is available in enterprise arrangements, the place where it is expected to be used.) There is tie-in with Microsoft SharePoint, so that may not help you.

There are also ways to design Microsoft Word .docx (not .doc) documents that have XML formatted data used/created in a form. There are ways to then extract the XML formatted data. This feature, which started in Office 2007, was called Custom Content and it now shows up in the Designer tab in Word 2013 (which has to be enabled in the Options). You can control the schema for a Custom XML Part and map fields to it. This may be tied to the XML Expansion Pack feature. I find it difficult to obtain more information just using the Help system.

For OpenOffice .odt documents, you will need to see how much support there is for the XForms feature and whether that can satisfy your requirements. It may take some work to extract the form results in XML. See http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide/XForms.

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It's not included with Office, but XML Notepad is a small free XML editor from Microsoft:

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Of course there are lots of XML editors, even free and portable ones, available. As per my comment above though I would advise you to provide a UI and not expose the XML files directly to all users (the advanced ones of course can fiddle with them while assuming all responsibility if they mess things up).

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