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4.6.4 Virtual components

Table 7 and figure 11 show the average number of pages, slides, and sheets found in Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. The substantial number of virtual components suggest that Office applications should be adapted to fetch virtual components on demand. To some extent this is already done by the applications when reading OLE archives in random access file systems or by Web browsers reading the XML representation. However, when Office applications open documents where random access is not available or when reading from the XML representation, they download the full document before returning control to the user. While providing universal random access support is likely to prove difficult, we believe that the current Office XML filters can be improved to support on-demand fetching. Alternatively, Puppeteer could provide this type of adaptation. As describe in section 2.1, Puppeteer could fetch the virtual components on demand and use OLE Automation to append them to the application.
 
Table 7: Virtual components. The table shows statistics for pages in Word, slides in PowerPoint, and sheets in Excel documents.
  Word PowerPoint Excel
Statistic Pages Slides Sheets
average 11.95 20.59 5.22
stdev 27.76 17.48 6.49


  
Figure 11: Average number of Word pages, PowerPoint slides, and Excel sheets.
\begin{figure}\psfig{file=plots/virtual.epsi,width=2.8in}
\end{figure}


next up previous
Next: Generality of results Up: Components Previous: Embedded components
Eyal DeLara
2000-05-16