2007 Microsoft® Office System Inside Out

Binding Data to Content Controls

The ability to bind external data to Content Controls in a Word document means that you can use XML to populate parts of a document with information that’s stored in other sources. For example, use data binding to automatically populate the user’s contact information in a typical business document or to populate fields in a boilerplate contract form. You can use any data source for this purpose that can be translated by XML—from data stored directly in the custom XML in the document’s ZIP package, to data in a Microsoft Exchange Server directory or a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services list.

In this section, we’ll look at the required elements of a bound control and then I’ll walk you through the process of binding ...