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 29500:2008 1 are referenced in the SDK.

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

• Getting started with the Open XML SDK for Office
• Open XML SDK class library reference

Working with packages

Migrating from previous versions

See also

• Open XML SDK for Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Office Developer Center
• Samples on GitHub
• Open XML SDK copyright notice
• Accessibility features in the Microsoft Office System
• Document conventions in Office Developer documentation

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.