Using Office as an IDE (was: Making word documents machine-readable)

Ok, I admit it: this is a bit crazy. :) I think this is a very good quote:

Get your data structures correct first, and the rest of the program will write itself.
David Jones

especially in the context of this post.

That enough fluff, now let's get to the stuff.

Let's assume that you get some kind of specification in a simple computer readable format, e.g., comma-seperated-values or XML. There are several things that you can do when provided with such specification:

• generate code, e.g., interfaces or test-cases
• automatically check you code (e.g., the states of a finite state machine handles the events they should and no more)
  
• automatic formal analysis of the specification (e.g., the finite state machine does not have any unreachable states)
  
• make sure the user documentation contains all parts of the documentation (e.g., a chapter for each foo and bar specified).

Nice, stuff. But what if you get the specification in a less computer friendly format like MS Word format? Luckily, OpenOffice can read Word files and convert those to an easier format like HTML or plain text format (this should be possible to do via command line according to this, although I haven't tried it). OpenOffice can also do similar thing with Excel files.

Ok, now you've got the Word or Excel file converted to plain text, now it's time to write that anayzer, code generator, or whatever you need. Code on!

Actually, when thinking about this I realized that a very cool thing to do would be to trigger the convert-to-text-and-generate-code process when the Word/Excel document is saved. This way, whoever is updating the Word/Excel file will immediately know if the document is consistent (if the process analyzed its content) or if the tests passed (of the process generated test-cases). Would that be awesome?

In some sense, this is using MS Office (or OpenOffice for that matter) like an IDE. Sound like madness to me, but perhaps its useful someone. Although I have to say that writing some document in MS Office, saving it, and a few seconds later getting an indication saying "document analysis result: 1 warning: no test-case for feature 'Foo is sent to Bar'." would be really cool. Or when saving an Excel file getting an indication saying "Data in cell (5, 4) made test-case 'Foo can hold configured number of Bar:s' fail."... that would be awesome.
Why? Dunno, it just would. :)