We thank you for your continued support and for sharing your document processing needs and requirements with us. In this blog post, I'll share our development/release plans for the first half of 2025.
If you’d like to discuss this roadmap in greater detail or share a business use case that our Office File API product does not currently address, feel free to submit your feedback via the DevExpress Support Center. We’ll be happy to follow up.
New PowerPoint API Presentation Library (Discuss This Feature)
We expect to extend the capabilities of the DevExpress Office File API library with a new Presentation library for .NET.
This non-visual library will allow developers to generate, modify, print, and export PowerPoint presentations to different formats in code. We expect to support the following PowerPoint-related usage scenarios programmatically:
- Create new presentations from scratch.
- Save presentations using the PPTX (OpenXml) document format.
- Merge multiple presentations into a single file.
- Add, remove, and extract presentation slides; modify slide settings.
- Add, remove, and customize slide elements (shapes, texts, tables and more).
- Apply formatting to slide elements.
- Print and export presentations to PDF.
Note: The CTP (Community Technology Preview) version of our PowerPoint Presentation Library is expected mid-year. As in any CTP, functional limitations will apply.
PDF Document API
PDF Document Compression (Discuss This Feature)
To reduce file size when saving PDF documents using DevExpress PDF Document APIs, we will introduce a compression engine for the PDF object streams. This engine will optimize PDFs for more efficient storage/sharing options. New compression mechanisms will apply to various document structures, including PDF forms, fonts, and graphics.
Redaction API (Discuss This Feature)
We’ll introduce a new Redaction API that allows users to secure PDF documents and permanently remove sensitive information. This feature will allow you to:
- Erase personal or confidential data from a PDF document and prevent end-users from accessing, viewing or copying it.
- Apply overlays with custom text or graphics over redacted areas.
WinForms and WPF PDF Viewers
AI-powered Behaviors (Discuss This Feature)
We will integrate AI-powered features into our WinForms and WPF PDF Viewer components. These enhancements will allow users to quickly understand the underlying essence of individual documents via Generative AI summaries and translate documents to a preferred language using AI-powered translations.
Additionally, users will be able to interact with an AI-powered assistant directly within their applications and ask questions about PDF documents.
Note: Our implementation is based on the functionality provided by the Microsoft.Extensions.AI library. To access these features, you will need to register the IChatClient implementation in your app (based on the desired AI services provider: OpenAI, Azure Open AI, Google Gemini or local open-source models powered by Ollama).
Spreadsheet Document API and Spreadsheet Controls for Winforms & WPF
OLE Objects (Discuss This Feature)
Spreadsheet components will support embedded and linked objects (OLE objects) within Excel documents. You will be able to import and save documents with OLE Objects to supported Excel formats without content loss. OLE Object icons will be properly displayed when you preview the document, print, or export it to PDF.
Additionally, we’ll introduce APIs to create, remove, and manage OLE objects in code.
New Excel Functions Support (Discuss This Feature)
We will enhance our Spreadsheet calculation engine by adding support for modern, dynamic array-based Excel functions. In v25.1, we will introduce functions like:
- XLOOKUP
- XMATCH
- UNIQUE
- And more
These functions will improve data lookup, filtering, and transformation capabilities across our Spreadsheet components.
Word Processing Document API and Rich Text Editors for Winforms & WPF
CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) Text Wrapping (Discuss This Feature)
To enhance document rendering and readability, our Word Processing library and Rich Text Editors will support CJK text wrapping and line breaking rules. This feature applies correct line breaks between characters for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) text. Documents using these wrapping rules will be displayed, printed, and exported to PDF with appropriate formatting.
RTL (Right-to-Left) Engine Enhancements
In our mid-year release v25.1, we will extend our RTL rendering engine for Rich Text components. This functionality will ensure correct rendering and PDF export for document paragraphs, tables and shapes containing bi-directional text (mixed Right-to-Left and Left-to-Right text blocks).
Export Word Content Controls to PDF AcroForm Fields (Discuss This Feature)
We will enhance our Word-to-PDF export engine and support the conversion of Word content controls into PDF AcroForm fields. With this capability, you'll be able to import or generate Word documents with content controls in our Rich Text document editing tools, export these documents to PDF, and automatically generate corresponding AcroForm fields in PDF output. This feature will apply to the following content control types:
- Plain Text Boxes
- Check Boxes
- Popups
Compare Word Documents (Discuss This Feature)
We will introduce new APIs to compare Word documents. This capability will allow you to:
- Identify changes between two document versions.
- Generate revision-based output highlighting.
Note: These new APIs will focus on detecting changes and making revisions for the visible document content only.
Your Feedback Counts
We appreciate your continued support. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, if you have Office/PDF File API-related suggestions or requests, please submit a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center — we'll be happy to review your feedback and follow up.
v24.2 - What’s New
If you have yet to review the features/capabilities introduced in our most recent major update, please visit the following webpage and let us know what you think of this release by responding to our online survey: Explore Our Newest Features (v24.2).