Here's some more information for those of you new to XML or at least Office XML. I mentioned in the previous post that it is possible to leverage Excel's XML file format to display your data in a rich way. There are actually two options here, but today...

I started this blog as a way of responding to news about the new formats, as well as give some insights into the goals and design decisions behind our XML support in Office. I hadn't really planned on doing any tutorial level posts, but I think it actually...

As you know, there are many tools available today for parsing XML. If you want to work with the MS Office XML files, you have a ton of options to choose from. There are a couple alternatives provided by Microsoft, but you can use whatever you want. The...

This isn't really news for most folks, but I wanted to better explain this for those folks new to XML. As I’ve mentioned before, the new formats are going to be fairly similar to WordprocessingML from Office 2003 in that they will not be pretty printed...

I wanted to get an example document posted so people get a chance to look through the new Office 12 XML formats and see what the similarities and differences are with the Word 2003 XML format. I took a basic document and saved it out in the new format...

One of the main reasons we announced this new file format so early was that we wanted to give people an opportunity to start working on building different types of solutions on top of the file formats. I’m pushing for an early release of the schemas ...

I've had a number of questions and e-mails asking if the new Office open XML formats are going to be the same as the OASIS OpenDocument format. Rather than reply to the various comments & e-mails separately I figured I'd just attempt to summarize...

There will be a repeat session of the Office 12 XML File Formats on Thursday @ 1:30. Here's the info: CLI393R - A Glimpse at the Direction of Microsoft Office Open XML Formats June 9, 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM N 210 B Brian Jones, Joe Andreshak This session...

Yesterday was the first presentation I gave on the new file formats since we made our announcement last week. It was a lot of fun. I focused a lot on just explaining what’s really going on with the new formats and what kind of an impact it will have....

The Office 12 buzzsite is now up and running. It's the best place to sign up for future updates on product news, and currently has some great resources around the XML formats. The two whitepapers that I've already linked to are there, as well as Q&A...

I've had a few questions from folks asking how people will be able to access and program against these files. As I've said (and I'm sure you're all aware by now), in it's simplest form it's just XML and ZIP. Most of the questions have been specifically...

I hope I'll get a chance to see everyone down in Orlando next week! I'll be down at teched from Sunday to Friday. I have a session on the new formats on Tuesday at 3: http://www.msteched.com/content/sessionview.aspx?TopicID=ac42ce75-1686-4725-bb99-7a02c1897b69...

I already mentioned this in one of my comments, but I wanted to expand on it a bit more. I want to first make clear though that I’m not trying to claim that we’re original for using ZIP, or found some new cool stuff that no one else knew about. One of...

There seems to be a number of questions and misunderstandings around the license for the schemas and what people are allowed to do with the files. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t want to try to interpret the license for you, but there is a pretty good FAQ...

Robert Scoble swung by last week and we talked a bit about these new formats (very cool guy). He recorded the interview and it's posted up here on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=73329

I’m Brian Jones, a program manager on the Word team. I’ve been at Microsoft for about 6 years, and have been working on XML support in Word and across Office for a good percentage of that time. I thought I’d set up this blog to talk with people about...