Office 2003 XML

Appendix B. The XSLT You Need for Office

XSLT plays a huge role in Office 2003. This book contains numerous examples of XSLT stylesheets for use in Word, Excel, InfoPath, and Access. Since proficiency in XSLT is a prerequisite for understanding much that’s in this book, your best bet (if you don’t already know XSLT) is to pick up one of the excellent books on XSLT that are already available. Here are some good books to choose from for learning XSLT:

• Michael Fitzgerald, Learning XSLT (O’Reilly)

• Jeni Tennison, Beginning XSLT (Wrox)

• Michael Kay, XSLT Programmer’s Reference (Wrox)

• Doug Tidwell, XSLT (O’Reilly)

• G. Ken Holman, Definitive XSLT and XPath (Prentice Hall)

• John E. Simpson, XPath and XPointer (O’Reilly)

• Sal Mangano, XSLT Cookbook, (O’Reilly)

If you are already comfortable with XSLT, then great—you might not need to read this appendix at all. For those of you who are new to XSLT, this appendix provides a brief introduction and tutorial, illustrating just a few aspects of this powerful language. Truthfully, when developing XML solutions for Office, the more XSLT you know, the better. While this appendix may provide a good start, it only scratches the surface.

After a brief overview of what XSL-FO, XSLT, and XPath are, we’ll look at three example stylesheets. The first two illustrate the most common use case for XSLT: transforming XML documents into HTML. The last example converts between one XML format and another XML format.

Tip

The examples in this appendix do not pertain ...