Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Microsoft Office 12's new XML format

(1/1)

zridling:
Although it's too bad that Microsoft didn't use the OASIS standard for XML schema, they claim it's solely because of their intent to remain backwardly compatible with MSO's prior binary formats. It was suggested that in a future version they would eventually go that route, though. A video interview with Brian Jones of the Microsoft Office team demonstrates some really cool things, and their press release is here and here is Brian's new blog. What's cool is that you can see everything in an office document now, and since it's zipped, you can open the file and exchange parts such as macros, pictures, excel sheets, whatever, and when you reopen the file, voila! there it is, updated.

If you're an OpenOffice user, this is also good news because starting with MS Office 12's new formats, OpenOffice will be able to convert MS Office files with perfect accuracy, and ironically, this should spur further adoption of OpenOffice! If you're a long time MSO user like myself and have over a decade of files locked into various closed Microsoft binary formats, this extends the half-life of your document integrity almost infinitely.

Darwin:
Heh, heh... Funny how tangentially prophetic your words were, Zaine! Thank goodness for the "extend[ed] half-life of...document integrity", eh?

zridling:
It was wildly unpredictable how the whole MS-OOXML thing turned out... with Microsoft supporting ODF as a native file format for Office in the next service pack! Too bad that MS-OOXML is just too complex to be viable in the long run.

Darwin:
with Microsoft supporting ODF as a native file format for Office in the next service pack!
-zridling (September 08, 2008, 05:31 PM)
--- End quote ---

Drat! I'd forgotten about that... That really changes the complexion of the thing, doesn't it  ;D

Navigation

[0] Message Index