Datawatch just announced the availability of Monarch V.9.0 which has the ability to output rich spreadsheet reports on data leveraging SpreadsheetML: http://www.datawatch.com/datawatch/news.asp?display=detail&id=128 This is pretty cool because...

The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) was released earlier this week. It's a tool that helps folks who are going to manage and upgrade to the latest version of Office (2007). Among other things, it will do a scan of your network to identify Office...

It's interesting to see the varying emotions people have had in reaction to the standardization of the Office Open XML formats. It was obviously an immense amount of work, and it resulted in a 6,000 page standard. As you all know by now, the reason there...

I'm sure most of you have had those annoying conversations with folks on a topic where that person views things in black and white. I definitely get annoyed when this pops up in politics for instance, and it's often times insulting. Anyone with knowledge...

I missed this last week: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/office_open_xml_import_filter It looks like some folks in Sun are working on support for Ecma 376's SpreadsheetML format within Open Office: The development of a new spreadsheet import...

I'm heading out to New York for a few days, but I wanted to send out a quick note around the ISO standardization process for OpenXML. The 1 month contradiction phase of the 6 month fast track process is now complete. It sounds like about 18 of the...

For those of you interested in the policies/politics side of file formats, I've seen a couple folks point out this bill currently in place in Texas ( http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/80R/billtext/html/SB00446I.htm ) As all of you know by now,...

I talked with Jon last week about XML in Office and he just posted it up on Channel 9 today: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=279550 -Brian

Huge news to wrap up the week! The open source project for creating a translator between the ODF text format and the OpenXML wordprocessing format has announced the release of version 1.0 of the tool ( http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=660889...