Microsoft said Thursday that it will introduce new XML-based file formats for its Excel, PowerPoint and Word applications when the company launches its Office 12 software package next year.
Company officials said the move to replace Microsoft's traditional binary file formats with open-standards-based XML versions will allow companies using Office 12 to more easily access data across XML's various applications.
Microsoft pledged that the shift to XML will decrease the size of many individual files and make documents created in its Office products more resistant to corruption.
While Microsoft's Excel and Word programs already offer some XML compatibility, the new formats will bring those applications, and PowerPoint, into a "full fidelity" version of the standard, said Takeshi Numoto, senior director for the Microsoft Office System.
The biggest advantage of the new formats, Numoto said, will be their capacity to allow workers to access data from various documents without opening individual files, and to allow workers to use that information in new ways.
"You can dream of many scenarios to integrate documents with multiple back-end data sources and line-of-business sources," Numoto said. "You could have Excel connected to sales data on a back-end system. This is a situation where the line between content and data becomes blurred."
The company said the new files will be compatible with its existing documents, and promised that it will distribute a free downloadable "converter" that allows users of Office 2000 and later versions of its productivity software to work with the new formats. Customers will have the option to not use the new files in Office 12, but the XML formats will be set as defaults in the three applications when the package ships, sometime in the second half of 2006.
In addition, when a person using one of the new Office formats opens and edits a document created in the old system, the file will be saved in the format in which it was originally created in an effort to simplify compatibility. The file extension names for the new formats will add a letter "x" to Microsoft's existing naming conventions, such that a document created in Word will have the suffix ".docx" added to its title.
The announcement marks the latest effort by Microsoft to adopt XML throughout its business software lines, an initiative that has been maturing since the company first said it would license the XML-based file formats used in its Office 2003 release. More recently, the firm announced that it had committed in perpetuity to offering a royalty-free license of Office-related XML document formats.
Talkback
I am confused, I thought this week's news was that MS had been granted (improper) patents on XML which is referred to in the article as an open standard, as it should be.
Office 12 is a few years behind OpenOffice.org. StarOffice and OOo have had XML + zip formats for years. So has Koffice. I guess imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. A major difference is that OOo's formats are not proprietary, like MS Office 12's. Yes, it is possible to make XML formats that are unreadable by competitors. Hence all the XML patents MS has been seeking.
However, the whole press release makes me wonder, "Why wait for MS when you can have XML based forms now in other products?" OpenOffice.org v2 even supports OpenDocument already.
You are and engineering company that issues some important specification to critical equipment in Word. Somebody in your IT department upgrades your version of Word. Fine, you think, until your supplier cannot read your document because they are using a older version of word.
I now get the feeling that many companies are going to find that Microsoft's history on not quite being 100% with open standards is going to backfire sooner rather than later, especially as they have a history of not getting it right with backward compatibility with their own software. The problem is this, many alternatives to Word have built in PDF generation facilities, and nearly everybody has a PDF reader of some kind installed on their PC. Since few companies use the extra features that Microsoft have introduced since Word 97, then there is the good possibility that more companies with question why they should upgrade to the latest version of Office.
Not everybody is a Supergeeky programmer, that is looking for solutions to problems they didn't even know existed.
The trick is to understand that when Microsoft speaks about "XML" they mean to say: "Microsoft XML". As is the case with, per example: "Microsoft Kerberos", "Microsoft TCP/IP", "Microsoft IPX", "Microsoft DOS", "Microsoft HTML", "Microsoft Java", etc, etc.
Embrace, Extend, Exterminate. Remember?
"Microsoft XML" comes with strings attached. There's stuff in their to lock customers in. There's stuff in their to lock out competitors.
It's not about open communication. It's about vendor specific communication for as long as that vendor sees fit.
In short: it's not about being able to speak with anyone once you agree upon a common language (English, French, Chinese, mathematics, morse, whatever) no matter what company, equipment and product the other guy is using. No, it's more about getting everyone to use the same equipment, company, product and language from the same vendor for as long as that vendor has no upgrades available.
A bit of a difference, I gather.