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.
