Gripe 1: Office 2003 Lost Opportunities (Excel & XML)

In my last post I mentioned I would talk about a few of the things I don´t like about the XML support in Office 2003. As a result there are lost opportunities for Microsoft and customers that will hopefully be resolved some time in the future (2 or 3 years maybe).

Gripe 1: Lack of full XML roundtripping support in Excel
With Excel 2002 you could save an Excel document to XML and reopen the document. They call this roundtripping a workbook. The exception was that you cant export certain types of objects to XML like graphs. As you may realize, most people who use Excel do a lot of charting. This was very disappointing as it limited the XML use for Excel

Excel 2003 adds a lot of new XML capabilities that are very useful. However, they did not add much to the roundtripping capabilities. Most of the same limitations still exist.

This is a major disappointment, as the #1 request I get from customers is the need to generate Excel documents on the server or to process documents on the server. Often Excel cannot be hosted on the server and this ties our hands.

My advise, when evalauating Excel and XML make sure it roundtrips everything you expect.

I´ll share gripe #2 on my next entry.