Getting started in Office 12
Apart from the new “cool” user interface, the essential difference between Office 12 and Office 2003 is in the use of XML functionality and file formats. To give some idea of what this means we turn to Brian Jones, a program manager in the Microsoft Office group.
Brian’s been working on the XML functionality in Office for about 5 years and has written a comprehensive series of articles on various aspects of Office 12 and its XML formats. “I think knowledge is really the key here, and I ask all of you who are interested to take some time to actually get your feet wet and understand the facts. I’ve made a number of posts over the past 3 months where I’ve tried to help explain the basics of the existing XML support in Office 2003 because that really helps to better understand what’s coming in Office ‘12′.”
Here are links to Brian’s articles on Word’s XML support and a short summary of each :
1. Intro to Word XML Part 1: Simple Word document - In this entry, I show how easy it is to create a basic Word XML document from scratch. You can just use a text editor like notepad to get started and viola, you’ve made you’re own Word document.
2. Intro to Word XML Part 2: Simple Formatting - In this entry, I build off the first document and show how formatting is applied to text. It’s important to see how this works, because it’s a different model than that used in HTML. There is a really flat hierarchy of objects that each have properties associated with them. It’s slightly confusing at first, but once you understand it, it makes dealing with formatting really easy.
3. Intro to Word XML Part 3: Using Your Own Schema - This is where it gets exciting (at least for me). You can use your own XML tags to add much more meaning to the documents. This allows for true interoperability of your documents with any system. It’s a core part of our XML support.
4. Intro to Word XML Part 4: Schema Validation - If you want to run validation against the XML you put in the documents, you can create a schema and give that schema to Word. We will validate the XML that you put in the document against the schema and report those errors.
5. Intro to Word XML Part 5: Opening custom XML - If you are already dealing with XML files, you can open those directly in Word for display and editing. You can either use the built in default view that Word applies, or you can create your own XSLT that creates a custom view on that XML. This is a great way of getting XML into a document.
6. Intro to Word XML Part 6: Locking down your XML structures - Once you’ve created a Word document that has your XML in it as well, you may want to lock that document down so that people editing that document don’t accidentally change the structures you’ve applied. You can use the range level protection functionality to lock the XML tags down, and only let the end users edit the content inside the tags.
These are just introductions, but give some indication of what can be done with XML support in Word.
XML is rapidly becoming a key software technology for broad corporate, IT, personal, and governmental use. XML enables a greater degree of data interoperability among different applications, Web services, and data stores compared to older technologies designed to address this issue.
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POSTED IN: File Formats, New Products, Office 12
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