New Microsoft Office Open XML formats will be the default
in the next versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Yardena Arar, PC World
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
New XML-based file formats will be the defaults for Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint documents in the next version of
Microsoft's market-dominant Office productivity suite, the
company announced today.
Code-named Office 12, the next version of Office is
expected to go into beta testing next fall and should ship
sometime in the second half of 2006, according to Chris
Capossela, corporate vice president for Microsoft's
Information Worker Product Management Group.
The Microsoft Office Open XML formats will be based on
Microsoft-defined XML schemas for each application. XML
stands for Extensible Markup Language, a specification
developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, originally to
facilitate the creation of customized Web documents. In
contrast to HTML, which is a set of predefined tags that
dictate the look of a document, XML allows document
creators to specify their own tags. This is done in a
schema.
Microsoft says that its new XML formats will be
royalty-free, so the documents should be easily accessible
in other applications that support XML. In addition, the
XML files will compress everything via Zip compression
technology, which will make typical files 50 percent to 75
percent smaller than they would be in today's default
Office formats (.doc for Word, .xls for Excel, and .ppt for
PowerPoint).
Office 12 won't be the first version of Office to support
XML; Office 2003 can save Word and Excel files in XML
formats, and Office XP included an XML spreadsheet format.
But adopting XML as the default is a major change that
should improve interoperability with third-party apps that
have struggled with today's famously nebulous and poorly
documented Office binary file formats.
************************************************************
** Even though Microsoft will be using its own schemas,
** Capossela says that the company will make them widely
** accessible, which in theory should help competitors such
** as WordPerfect and OpenOffice handle the new formats.
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Pete Holsberg
Columbus, NJ
---
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never
happen. Keep in the sunlight.
Benjamin Franklin
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