Displays OLE document (e.g. MS Office) as a standard sprite Version 1.0 49.00 US$ zip file: 873.6 kB in Kagi online store
	This xtra is Shockwave-Safe

Overview

Compatibility

Lingo API

Opinions

SmartOLE Xtra overview

SmartOLE Xtra allows to display on the stage any kind of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) document as a standard sprite. You can set its transparency and blending, and display other sprites in front of it.

Our Xtra is especially useful to handle MS Office documents - Word (doc), Excel (xls), PowerPoint (pps). For instance, to create a sophisticated formatted text combined with images, charts and vector shapes is much easier in Word than in Director directly.

You can activate a document and go into the edit mode on the stage as well as by running the OLE server as an independent application with its own window. In the former case you can edit the OLE document in its OLE server application while not leaving the projector window.

Note. In the non-active mode only the first page of a given OLE document can be displayed. It is the limitation of OLE specification, not the xtra one. But you can partially modify the size of a displayed area by increasing the size of the document page (e.g. with option Page setup in the OLE server application, provided that this option is available).

To display a document correctly its OLE server application is required to be installed in the system.

Main features

• Displaying any kind of OLE document as a standard sprite (transparency, blending, etc.)
• Editing the document either on the stage or in an OLE server application window
• Several types of display available, including Crop, Scale, Autosize, etc.
• Scrolling (but first page only)
• Automatic activating (i.e. going in the edit mode) at a specified mouse event
• Copying and pasting OLE documents to/from the clipboard
• Downloadable Shockwave version available

How it works

1. Create any OLE document, e.g. "sample.doc" file using MS Word.




Sample OLE document - "sample.doc" file

2. Load the OLE document into SmartOLE Xtra using its dialog window.




SmartOLE Xtra dialog window

3. Create SmartOLE Xtra sprite displaying the OLE document on the stage. Displayed sprite can be treated as simple sprite - you can set its transparency, blending, size, foreground / background colors etc.




Sample OLE document on the stage

4. You can activate and edit the OLE document "in place", i.e. in Director projector window, using MS Word toolbars and controls.




Sample OLE document activated in Director projector window

Demo application

There is available demo application as the source code and also as the projector, showing how to use SmartOLE Xtra and its Lingo API.