Amazing News! New XML File Formats in Office 12
There is a lot of excitement about recent announcements concerning the Office 12 new XML based file formats. First, let me point out that those who have used the XML formats with Office 2003 have found many benefits. The XML format opens the door to numerous benefits for the solutions developer. Using Office to author documents and then having the ability to open that file from any other environment (Java, .NET, etc) is powerful. It gets even more powerful when any other tool can generate an Office document. XML is the biggest thing to happen to Office since the introduction of VBA years ago.
The problem: Office 2003 doesn’t go far enough. The challenge Microsoft has is to innovate in the products and to try to force fit XML into the product. With Office 12, it appears Microsoft is taking a major leap of faith in creating a new set of XML file formats that support 100% XML round tripping for both Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Why is this a leap of faith? Microsoft intends to make these new XML file formats the default instead of the old .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT.
This will make many people nervous because of potential compatibility issues with older versions of Office. To mediate this issue, Microsoft will release converters for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003, so customers using previous versions will be able to open files created using the new file formats.
Personally I’m very excited about this. At some point in time we have to move forward. The old file formats have reached their capacity and usefulness. To continue to innovate in this changing world we need better a modern way to access the valuable data contained in Office. Would you rather programmatically talk to the OLE compound document format Office currently uses or an XML file format? I’m guessing most of you would respond XML.
Here are some useful resources to digest the Office 12 file format:
Press release, FAQ, and other resources:
Blogs: