J.4.3 Understanding the Length of a Document

Similarly, the length of a document is easy to ascertain using simple document properties. For a simple presentation, the Slides element in appdata.xml describes the number of slides in a presentation.

<Properties
xmlns="http://purl.oclc.org/ooxml/officeDocument/extendedProperties"
xmlns:vt="http://purl.oclc.org/ooxml/officeDocument/docPropsVTypes">
  <TotalTime>0</TotalTime>
  <Words>0</Words>
  <Application>Microsoft Office PowerPoint</Application>
  <PresentationFormat>On-screen Show (4:3)</PresentationFormat>
  <Paragraphs>0</Paragraphs>
  <Slides>21</Slides>
  <Notes>0</Notes>
  …
</Properties>

Similar metrics for lengths of documents can be found for both documents and spreadsheets. Documents, for example, can express their lengths in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to, the number of pages, the number of words and even the number of characters.

<Properties
xmlns="http://purl.oclc.org/ooxml/officeDocument/extendedProperties"
xmlns:vt="http://purl.oclc.org/ooxml/officeDocument/docPropsVTypes">
  <Template>Disposition of Comment Template</Template>
  <TotalTime>0</TotalTime>
  <Pages>5</Pages>
  <Words>413</Words>
  <Characters>2356</Characters>
  …
</Properties>

Higher-order constructs can also be used to denote length like the number of sections in documents, the number of slides in a custom show in presentations and the number of worksheets in spreadsheets.

Additionally, implementers of Office Open XML documents are allowed to provide their own set of length metrics by way of custom properties.