The Summary Information Property Set

COM defines a standard common property set for storing summary information about documents. The Summary Information property set must be stored in an IStream instance off of the root storage object; it is not valid to store the property set in the "Contents" stream of a named IStorage instance.

For example, to create an ANSI simple property set, you would call IPropertySetStorage::Create to create the property set, specifying PROPSETFLAG_ANSI (simple is the default mode), then write to it with a call to IPropertyStorage::WriteMultiple. To read the property set, you would call IPropertyStorage::ReadMultiple.

All shared property sets are identified by a stream or storage name with the prefix "\005" (or 0x05) to show it is a property set shareable among applications, and the Summary Information property set is no exception. The name of the stream that contains the Summary Information property set is:

"\005SummaryInformation" 
 

The FMTID for the Summary Information property set is:

F29F85E0-4FF9-1068-AB91-08002B27B3D9 
 

Use the DEFINE_GUID macro to define the FMTID for the property set:

DEFINE_GUID(FormatID_SummaryInformation, 0xF29F85E0, 0x4FF9, 0x1068, 0xAB, 0x91, 0x08, 0x00, 0x2B, 0x27, 0xB3, 0xD9); 
 

On an Intel byte-ordered machine, the FMTID has the following representation:

E0 85 9F F2 F9 4F 68 10 AB 91 08 00 2B 27 B3 D9 
 

The following table shows the string property names for the Summary Information property set, along with the respective property identifiers and VT type indicators.