This is the 2 nd post in a series by Zeyad Rajabi who is a program manager working on Word's XHTML output used in Word's new blogging feature. My first blog gave a brief introduction on our XHTML output for the blogging feature in Word 2007. This post...

I wanted to follow up on the thread I started a couple weeks ago discussing the design goals behind spreadsheetML. There's a whole host of things we've done to make sure that the move to XML formats is a huge benefit to developers, without it actually...

I was wondering if someone more familiar with the ODF spec could help me out. I had made the following reply yesterday to Alex's assertion that ODF was as feature rich as Open XML and I want to make sure that I'm not misstating things: I think you...

I saw this article up on betanews this afternoon saying that just 24 hours after going live, there were already 200,000 downloads of Beta 2. I thought that was pretty impressive and asked a few folks about it. It turns out that we're actually now over...

There is now a really easy way to provide feedback as you are using Office 2007. Directly from Joe Friend's blog : Sending Feedback We have a great program called "Send a Smile" that provides you the opportunity to tell us what you think about...

Hard to believe it's only been a year since I first started blogging... so much has happened. It's really great that we went out so early with the news of the file format change, we started talking about it an entire year before we shipped a public beta...

There has been a great overall reaction to the news last week of Ecma's first public draft for the Office Open XML formats . One thing that is now absolutely clear to everyone that we are talking about an extremely rich and powerful set of file formats...

A coworker of mine, just reminded me that for those folks interested in using the new Open XML formats but don't want to upgrade to Office 2007 Beta 2, we also released a public preview of the compatibility packs (thanks Jon!). This is one of the other...

I just ran across this link today and was wondering if anyone else had checked it out: http://shudson310.blogspot.com/2006/05/docbook-xsl-170-released.html It looks like there is a docbook project up on sourceforge that has XSLT support for going from...

This is shaping up to be a pretty cool month. Last week we finally had the first public draft of Ecma's Office Open XML format standard released. Now today the first public beta of Office 2007 has been released. I'd really encourage everyone to head...

Today we have a guest writer to discuss the HTML output that we have in the new blogging functionality for Word 2007. His name is Zeyad Rajabi and he's a program manager on the Word team. Zeyad works on file format related issues, including the HTML support...

Wow, we finally have an updated draft of the Ecma Office Open XML formats standard! http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC45-2006-50.htm I've been waiting for a long time to be able to share all the great work that's been going on...

There is a new article that will be in the June MSDN magazine that shows how to work with a Word document's properties programmatically. The author, Ken Getz has actually been working on building a collection of code snippets that people can use to do...

Surprisingly, I haven't seen much information out there discussing the performance impacts of XML tag name lengths (ie using "<c>" instead of "<table-cell>"). My last post about some of the design goals behind SpreadsheetML raised some questions...

There were a few interesting articles I saw this week that I wanted to point people at. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/14543676.htm "… if government locks in winners and losers, manufacturers will focus on courting government...

Joe Friend has finally made it public that there will be built in blog functionality in Word 2007 ! I used it for authoring my last post, and I loved it. I wanted to mention it at the time, but didn't want to take away any of Joe's thunder. :-) I had...

It's been awhile since I've talked in detail about the SpreadsheetML schema and I apologize. I had a number of posts back in the summer which talked through Office XP's SpreadsheetML format that we built about 6 years ago, but obviously a lot has changed...

I'm in New York right now, and I was talking to some folks yesterday about the work that we've been doing in Ecma. It reminded me that I hadn't posted very much information on by blog though about how the meeting in London went last month. Adam Farquhar...