One of the big limitations of using Excel is that you can't really use the data inside the spreadsheets out of the box. Mark Logic has solved that problem by releasing the Mark Logic Toolkit for Excel. This is a free tool offered to Mark Logic customers under an open source license. The tool enables companies to build applications on top of Excel to get at that data and programatically share it with other systems by taking advantage of Office Open XML (OOXML), the native Office XML format.

This enables organizations to, among other things, search across Excel spreadsheets and do things like automate the creation of XBRL reports. Mark Logic gives the following example: "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."

The Excel toolkit comes on the heels of two other Microsoft Office 2007 toolkits released earlier this year; Toolkit for Word and a Connector for SharePoint, both of which provide a way to get at content inside these popular Microsoft tools. The toolkits are all available for free in the Mark Logic Developer Workshop.