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SAN CARLOS, Calif. – June 16, 2009 – MarkLogic Corporation, a leading provider of infrastructure software for information applications, today released the MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel®. This new offering provides users a free, simple way to integrate Microsoft Office Excel 2007 with MarkLogic Server. Earlier this year, MarkLogic also delivered a Toolkit for Word® and a Connector for SharePoint®. Together, these offerings allow users to extend the functionality of Microsoft Office products and quickly build applications leveraging the native document format, Office Open XML (OOXML).

Distributed under an open source model, MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel comes with an Excel add-in that allows users to deploy information applications into Excel, comprehensive libraries for managing and manipulating Excel data, and a sample application that leverages best practices. Toolkit for Excel capabilities include:

  • Enhanced Search – the MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel offers greater search functionality, allowing organizations to search across their Excel files for worksheets, cells, and formulas. Search results can be imported directly into the workbooks that users are actively authoring. Workbooks, worksheets, formulas, and cells can be exported directly from active Excel documents to MarkLogic Server for immediate use by queries and applications.
  • Creation and Manipulation of Excel Workbooks – the MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel allows customers to easily create new Excel workbooks from existing XML documents. Users can now manipulate and re-use workbooks stored in the repository with a built-in XQuery library. For instance, a financial services firm can replace the manual process of cutting-and-pasting information from XBRL documents to create reports in Excel with an automated system. Utilizing Toolkit for Excel, this streamlined process extracts relevant sections of XBRL reports, combines them, and saves them as an Excel file. This method of manipulating documents is more efficient because customers can create high quality Excel documents without the need to run Microsoft Office.
  • Custom Metadata for Excel Documents – the MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel allows users to add and edit multiple custom metadata documents across workbooks. This improves the ability for users to discover and reuse information contained in Excel spreadsheets.

“Now that Microsoft has opened up its document formats, MarkLogic is extending the features in Office with the rich search, analysis, and delivery capabilities of our XML server,” said Jason Monberg, vice president of product management, MarkLogic Corporation. “Our customers and partners are able to leverage the power of XML to jump-start application development with the common interfaces they are already comfortable and familiar with.”

To download MarkLogic Toolkit for Excel, please visit the MarkLogic Developer Workshop located at http://developer.marklogic.com/code/.