Beating a dead horse with Office 12 and XML
I know by now you’ve heard that Office 12’s default file format will be XML.
This doesn’t seem too radical to me, as Office 2003 already has some XML support, but it sounds like they are going to make it better this time around. I think the most exciting part about all of this is that its going to make it so much easier to extend the Office functionality using .NET. I’m assuming they will release the .xsd files that correspond to the Office xml formats, meaning you can use xsd.exe to make XmlSerializer friendly object representations of Office documents. I’m really curious to see the extent of the XML file format in Outlook. If all of my emails and calendar items are stored as XML, it seems like it would be really easy to make some cool Outlook AddIns (nothing against the current outlook api).
It’ll be interesting to see some of the cool new Office applications that people come up with when Office 12 comes out.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on June 3, 2005 @ 6:24 am
The really really really cool thing is the backwards compatibility for Office 2000+. If you’ve ever been frustrated by Office Automation, now you can kick Excel to the curb and say “no more”!
Products like ExcelWriter with their $10,000 site-licensing fees will no longer be necessary.
Anyone will be able to spit out an Office document in an automated manner without expensive tools, without interop, and with enough backwards compatibility to not have to care. It’ll sure make my job a lot easier.