Brian Jones: Office Solutions

Sorry for just posting links the past week or so. I haven't had much time to pull anything new together. Hopefully I'll have some more free time when I get back into the office next week. Can anyone be objective about Open XML? Great blog entry from...

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...

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...

We're a couple weeks away from the final decision on whether DIS 29500 will become IS 29500 and if ISO will take on the stewardship of the Open XML formats. We already had a good preview of the type of work we can achieve within the SC34 group over the...

As promised last month , the binary documentation (.doc, .xls, .ppt) is now live. In addition to this, the project to create an open source translator (binary -> Open XML) has now been formed on sourceforge, and the development roadmap has been published...

Today we announced the formation of a new customer council focused on interoperability (how to make technologies work better together). I'm sure you've noticed over time that Microsoft has made a strong commitment to work towards better interoperability...

I was having lunch with Jean Paoli today and he told me about this press release that came out this morning from the German national standards body ( DIN ), where they've formed a working group that will focus on the translation of document formats in...

I saw this blog from one of the current chairs of the ODF committee in OASIS: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/12/bait-and-switch.html So, ODF was adopted as an ISO standard about a year ago, and since then there has already been a new version of ODF...

I hope everyone had a great new year. Sorry I've taken so much time off from blogging. I was pretty busy last week just getting caught up on e-mail. For those of you who posted comments, or sent comments to me directly, I'll try to get to them all (sorry...

Now that folks have had a chance to work with Beta 1 for a few months, I wanted to take some time to give a high level overview of the three different document formats. Today I'm going to focus on Word. Obviously there is a huge set of features and functionality...

OK, I'll admit its pretty lame that it's been almost two weeks since my last post. I've been pretty busy with non-OpenXML stuff at work as we just finished wrapping up the annual performance reviews so I had to focus on writing those up. We're also getting...

Recently a couple people have questioned the decision to leave the legacy Excel date behavior in the Open XML formats. This was primarily triggered by a post from IBM's Rob Wier . While those folks have referred to it as an Excel bug, it's actually something...

Here's the official statement, although it's in Finnish: http://www.sfs.fi/ajankohtaista/tiedotteet/20080327195555.html Finland had initially voted "abstain" back in September, but they have now decided to change their vote to "yes" in support of DIS...

I just back back from Brussels and the first meeting of Ecma's TC45 ; it was an awesome start and I'm extremely excited about the work we have ahead of us. The initial draft of the standard was submitted by Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library...

Today we are announcing the details behind the upcoming 2007 Microsoft Office system products. We had previously been referring to it as Office "12", but we now have an official name and there is a ton of other information now available about the packaging...

Well, it has definitely been a pretty hectic couple weeks, and it's going to take me awhile to get caught up. I was in Boston two weeks ago for TechEd, and in Sapporo last week for Ecma meetings. Both were great trips, but it's nice to be home. The meetings...

If you're interested in seeing the presentation I gave at PDC back in September, it's now available online: http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/OFF/OFF304.htm#nopreload=1&autostart=1 It's about an hour and 15 mins. It's pretty much a developer...

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...

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,...

In the comments of my latest post around the legal issues we’re currently dealing with from Adobe around our PDF support in Office 2007 a number of folks were wondering when Adobe would provide their side of the story. Well while I was down in Tech Ed...

I wanted to talk about some of the comments I wish we could have dealt with but we didn't have enough time. We'll need to follow up with the national body for more information, and deal with it in maintenance. Here's the full list if you are interested...

Last week we held the 5 th face-to-face meeting of Ecma TC45, and this time it was hosted by Microsoft. It was nice being able to stay out here in Redmond for once <g/>. At the meeting, we all agreed to make working draft 1.4 publicly available...

Earlier today I got an e-mail from Max asking if I could help clarify the section of the specification that deals with compatibility settings. Max was reading a blog post from IBM, and was hoping that I could respond with my point of view. Here's the...

It seems like the big milestones just keep coming for Office '12'. Today, a select group of our customers and partners were given access to the first beta of Office '12'. This is just our next step towards the final release of Office '12' which is scheduled...

I know Rob Weir has been traveling a lot these days lobbying against Open XML across the world, so when I saw this post yesterday I assumed it must be jetlag. I think he completely misunderstood some of the responses from Ecma related to the issue of...