Revision as of 15:06, 7 February 2008

SmartArt

SmartArt is one of the new features of MS-Office 2007 and is about simply creating diagrams automatically. You select a layout, select colors, enter some textual data, and voilà.

This is the diagram part of DrawingML

Import

The current strategy to import is to generate shapes from the diagram data. The result will be lossy compared to the Office Open XML document as it will not include the diagram information anymore. Don't expect round-trip conversion.

Generation

The generation of a SmartArt is the action of generating drawing elements from the data model, layout and color style combination.

Future?

This is just ideas for the future. These are not actual plans.

Ideally in the future, OpenOffice.org could have a similar feature with a UI. That would require changes in both the file format and the importer. It could be written as an extension, and should be available to all the OpenOffice.org components: Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress.

Ideally the file format changes could mandate to have a pre-rendered representation of the diagram in order to not require to implement the feature in other readers.

Links

• Creating custom Smart Art: provide a better understanding of the underlying layout model.