Use the Open XML Package Editor together with Word to Research Markup

A question was recently posed to me – what is the best way to look at markup and the rendering of the markup simultaneously.  This is important, for instance, when you are experimenting with markup and determining the exact markup that you want to generate.  My favorite way to work with this is to use the Open XML Package Editor Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 together with Word 2010 to do the research.  The key to this approach is to open the OpenXML document in Visual Studio, make changes, save them, then open the resulting document in Word.  You can then make changes in Word, save the document, close the document, and then see the results of those changes in Visual Studio 2010.

There are a couple of small tricks that make this easier.  The following video demonstrates those tricks, as well as the entire process of researching markup in this fashion.