Brian Jones: Office Solutions

It's really amazing how quickly this summer is going by. The Seahawks are starting up training camp out in Cheney, and we are now just a little over a month away from PDC where we'll be introducing a lot more of the new functionality for Office 12. A...

[This post has been removed due to legal concerns]

Chris and Charles from OfficeZealot called me a couple weeks ago and we talked about the new formats. They recorded the conversation and posted it online here: http://geeklenet.typepad.com/ozpodcast/2005/07/show_5_intervie.html . As you can imagine, being...

This is a bit of a more obscure feature that I like to point out every now and then. It's great if you are interested in building up a Word document from multiple pieces of content. This is a common scenario I've talked with a number of folks about over...

This is a bit off topic, but I wanted to point out that Steven Sinofsky (senior vice president of Office) has started blogging about careers at Microsoft and general discussions around college hiring. Here's a blurb from his first post : I wanted...

If you read Part 1 of the Word XML Introduction, you saw the basics behind a Word document, as well as how basic formatting can be applied. The Word XML schemas were designed to closely map the structures that Word uses internally to represent a document...

Going into the announcement about the new formats last month there was just a ton of content that had to be reviewed. There were a couple of whitepapers, an FAQ, the press release, etc. I actually thought I'd done a pretty good job of reviewing the stuff...

There are two forms of the new formats, one that supports VBA and one that doesn't. I just read this article , and it sounds like there have been some misunderstandings around this fact. If you read through the whitepapers ( Microsoft Office Open XML...

I just read this post on document security: http://news.com.com/Document+security+Tell+me+another+joke/2010-1071_3-5783062.html?part=rss&tag=5783062&subj=news Obviously there are many different issues here, some easier to solve than others...

Give us your feedback on the design of the file format. While the number one priority with the new formats will always be that the experience for the average end user doesn't change, I also care a lot about how useful they are to developers. I would love...

If you've played around with Word 2003's XML support, you're probably aware that you can load your own schemas into Word and markup the document with your XML. When you save the file out, you get both the WordML and your XML mixed together. This allows...

Are you interested in learning more about XML support in Office 2003? There are some great labs available online to help people get more familiar with the XML support in Office. These labs are available to everyone, you just need to set up an account...

Some of you who have worked with Office 2003 xml files may have noticed that while we use the ".xml" extension, the files still show unique icons and the original application is launched when you double click them. The files are totally valid XML files...

This post is for those of you interested in learning the basics behind WordprocessingML. That’s the schema that we built for Word 2003. You can save any Word document as XML, and we will use this schema to fully represent that document as XML. The new...

Those previous two posts were meant to help people unfamiliar with Office XML get a taste of how you would go about building your own spreadsheets. The power of doing this with XML is that you can read and generate these files anywhere you want. You don...