New Office gets under skin of documents

By RICHARD WOOD

The next version of Microsoft Office, to be released on October 22, is as much for developers as for office workers.

The support for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) within the Professional editions of Office 2003 means corporate developers will be able to access data easily within Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents and also use the popular software as a front end to enterprise information systems.

Microsoft has also added a forms package called Infopath that will allow direct data collection in XML.

US-based Office lead program manager Martin Sawicki attended Microsoft New Zealand's Tech Ed conference last week to explain the XML support to local IT developers.

He says businesses want to extract data sitting within Word and Excel documents. These use proprietary formats but with XML the entire document or spreadsheet's internal structure is made visible.

Each component of a document can be tagged with simple text tags so that software can identify it when required, allowing for more efficient automation between the desktop and back-end systems, for data mining and automatic report generation.

Microsoft has defined its own tags for the regular pieces of a document. Programmers can define their own.

For each document type, tags are grouped as a heirarchical tree called an XML Schema, to ensure standard use across an enterprise. In this way the schema provides an enhanced templating function.

Typical schemas used in business would include resumes, purchase orders, legal contracts, financial reports and sales data.

Microsoft's schemas for Word and Excel are defined, and customers will make specific ones for the applications they are creating, but Sawicki acknowledges the lack of a simple tool from Microsoft to allow non-technical people to create XML schemas.

The new Word and Excel will be able to save documents directly into XML format or, as an option, save the user XML data separately.

When that data is reopened the system can automatically show it in the original form, or within any other pre-developed formats.

Software packages included in Office, depending on edition, include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, Visio, FrontPage, Project and Publisher, as well as new titles InfoPath and OneNote.

OneNote is a note-taking application using pen, voice or typing.

Office 2003 will retail at $299 for the Student and Teacher edition, $899 for the Standard Edition, and $1199 for the Professional Enterprise edition.

A new small-business edition costs $999.