Brian Jones: Office Solutions

Jensen Harris has started blogging about the new Office "12" UI. Folks who attended the keynotes at PDC, got to see the first look at the new UI. From everyone I talked to, there is a lot of excitement and I heard over and over that folks can't wait to...

Thanks to everyone that came to my PDC session yesterday on the new Office "12" file formats. We covered a lot of information around the new formats and had a number of examples of things you will be able to do now that Office has an open accessible file...

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Wow, there were a ton of great comments on my last post . While there were a large number of them, there were two primary themes I saw repeated. The first was that there are still a number of concerns around the true "openness" of the MS Office Open XML...

I just read this article today about Massachusetts wanting to move away from closed formats and standardize on open formats (OpenOffice's XML and PDF). While it's not mentioned in the article, from what I've been told there is not yet a decision made...

At this point, we're getting really close to PDC and I can't wait. At PDC, I'm going to go through some examples of the new formats in all three applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). I'll continue to talk about Office 2003 as well, but there will...

In almost any solution you build in Word, there will be times that you either want to capture the content from part of the document, or insert some additional content at some location in the document. One example scenario I've seen for this are clause...

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We put an article up back in the winter on transforming from WordprocessingML into XSL-FO. From there, you can go into other formats like PDF. Not sure if you guys have already seen this, but if not you should check it out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/office...

Jerry Dunietz is now up on Channel 9 talking about the XML Paper Specification. They use ZIP in a similar way to how we use it in Office to store our XML files. In fact, the APIs that they release for parsing through the contents of their packages (files...

In the Intro to Word XML Part 3 , I showed how you could add your own XML to a Word document. I also briefly touched on how you could take advantage of the XML to make programming against the document a lot easier. Let's now briefly explore data validation...

Slashdot: MS Office XML Format Now in TextEdit I saw this the other day on slashdot. I have to admit that this is the first time I've heard about this and I'm not really familiar with exactly what is being output by TextEdit. In the slashdot post there...

TechWeb: XML From Office? Microsoft's Open Promise http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/content_management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=165700225#_ I thought Doug made some good points in his article, but there was still come skepticism...

This isn't a post on XML or the file formats, but I just saw this and wanted to link to it. Just the other day a tool was posted that allows you to do redaction on a Word document. You can get the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...

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...

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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...