About smart documents
Smart documents are documents that are programmed to give you help as you use them. Several types of documents, such as forms and templates, work well as smart documents.
Several types of workbooks, such as forms and templates, work well as smart documents. Smart documents work especially well for workbooks that are part of a process. For example, your company may have a process for filling out annual employee expense forms, and you may already use an Microsoft Office Excel 2003 template for this purpose. If that template is turned into a smart document, it can be connected to a database that automatically fills in some of the required information, such as your name, employee number, manager's name, and so on. When you complete the expense report, the smart document can display a button that allows you to send it on to the next step in the process. Because the smart document knows who your manager is, it can automatically route itself to that person. And, no matter who has it, the smart document knows where it is in the expense review process and what needs to happen next.
Smart documents can help you reuse existing content. For example, attorneys can use existing boilerplate when writing contracts, and journalists can insert bylines and other commonly used text.
Smart documents can make it easier to share information. They can interact with a variety of databases and use Microsoft BizTalk Server for tracking workflow. They can even interact with other Microsoft Office applications. For example, you can use smart documents to send e-mail messages through Microsoft Outlook, all without leaving the document or starting Outlook.
You convert your Excel workbooks into smart documents by attaching XML expansion packs to them. An XML expansion pack contains multiple components, including Extensible Markup Language (XML) files and a manifest that references those components. When you open a document attached to an expansion pack, Excel also opens the Document Actions task pane. That pane can include tools for completing tasks and help for using the smart document. The specific features that a smart document provides depend on the developer or IT professional who creates it.
If you don't have development or IT resources, you can download smart documents created by third parties. If you're a developer and you want to know more about creating smart documents, see the Smart Document Software Development Kit on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site.
Note When you first try to use Smart Documents, you may see an error message saying that you need to install the common language runtime components, or you need a different version of the components. If you see that type of message, contact your system administrator.