On Microsoft Publisher and more

It has been great to see the web buzz over the past few days over the availability on the Microsoft Download Center of the Microsoft Add-ins for Office 2007 for Save as PDF and Save as XPS. The better news comes today that you can now actually use these with the public release of the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh. (The add-ins are specifically for Office 2007, and if you had Beta 2, then you already had the Beta 2 versions of these.)

While the PDF and XPS export add-ins are still at a beta stage, we have made a number of improvements since beta 2, so I encourage you to send your most complex documents through. If you use screen readers or other accessibility tools, let us know about our document structure tagging. If you submit documents to governments or archiving systems that require ISO-standard PDF, try out the ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) support. If you have a PDF print workflow, send add-in generated documents through it. If you are already providing us with Office beta feedback (thank you), you can keep using the channels that work for you. If you are looking for a new way to provide feedback, you can use the Publisher 2007 Connect site for all PDF and XPS add-in feedback. (PDF and XPS bugs are most useful to us when you include the original Office document as well as the PDF or XPS.)

To view PDF files, you need a PDF reader. (Adobe Reader is a popular one.)

To view XPS files, you need an XPS reader. If you have Windows Vista RC1, then you should be set already. If you are running Windows XP (or 2000 or 2003), you can download the XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack to view XPS documents. Beta 2 of this pack was recently released.

I seem to have become a top search engine result for queries for a Microsoft Publisher Viewer. The bad news is that there is no Microsoft Publisher Viewer. The good news is that we have a better solution to this problem coming with Publisher 2007. Every time we look at doing a Publisher Viewer, we run into the problem of how to get enough distribution that people could reliably share Pub files and count on the viewer being available at the other end. We also think there is a limit to the number of single-application viewers that people want to download. Instead what customers have long been asking us for is a way to get Publisher content into application-independent viewable formats.

For Publisher 2007, we plan to make available free add-ins from Microsoft that enable the generation of both PDF and XPS files from Pub. PDF viewers are widely deployed today, and XPS viewers are starting to become available. As they do for earlier versions of Publisher, we also expect that third parties will offer their own solutions for capturing and sharing output from Publisher.

For current versions of Publisher, your best bets for sharing Pub content electronically are printing to the Microsoft Office Document Imaging format (a viewer is part of various versions of Microsoft Office) or saving or printing through one of the various third-party tools that generate PDF.

Somewhat off topic, I also want to call out the Publisher Connect web site, which is a great way to provide us feedback. We recently put up this site and don't have a lot of content there right now, but we do have a way to provide feedback to the product team that won't bottleneck through me. For Publisher support questions, please see the Microsoft Publisher 2003 Help and Support Center on Microsoft Office Online. I cannot provide product support through this blog.

Recently, I have had a number of questions on this and I am happy to confirm that Office “12” will support a native Save as XPS feature in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Visio, OneNote and InfoPath. This, of course, raises a whole bunch of additional questions for me to answer:

-          What’s XPS?

-          Why would I want to use XPS?

-          Isn’t Windows already doing this?

-          How does this relate to the Save as PDF feature?

-          How do I view an XPS document?

I’ll take these in order, but first, a picture (from a current build of Word):

What is XPS?

XPS, or the XML Paper Specification, is Microsoft’s new electronic paper format for exchanging documents in their final forms. This Office feature provides a one-way export from Office client applications to an application- and platform-independent, paginated format. More information on XPS is available on Andy Simonds’ blog and at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/.

Unlike the Office Open XML Formats, XPS does not attempt to capture the full structured richness of an Office document. As an electronic paper format, it is all about a high fidelity representation of the output only. Because of this, creation of an XPS document from Office is a one-way, export operation.

Why ?

XPS is an electronic paper format built around the same Open Packaging Conventions document structure as the new Office file formats. This means a Zip container and XML content. (Brian Jones writes lots on Office’s use of the Open Packaging Conventions.) As such it plays well with other technologies like Microsoft Information Rights Management (IRM) and is open to developers to read and write, using APIs in the Windows Presentation Foundation or any other tools capable of working with XML and Zip. This openness makes XPS convenient for a range of scenarios in which it is useful to inspect or modify the contents of the “paper” programmatically.

How does this relate to the XPS print driver?

The Windows Digital Documents team is delivering a print driver with Windows Presentation Foundation that will enable all applications that can print to create XPS files. The support for XPS output in Office “12” goes beyond what is typically passed to a printer, including the supporting information to enable, for example, working hyperlinks, searching, efficient representation of transparency and gradients, accessible documents, and document rights when the source document has restricted IRM rights.

So Office is supporting two electronic paper output formats?

Yes. We think choice is a good thing.

How do I view an XPS document?

With an XPS Viewer, of course. You likely don’t have one of these yet, (unless you have the Windows Presentation Foundation September CTP) but Microsoft is committed to delivering viewers for Windows Vista and downlevel versions of Windows, with Windows Presentation Foundation, and directly or through partners, for a range of other platforms. Of course, if you don’t like any of these viewers, the format is open and documented and you could always write your own.

Watch this space. I’ll be writing more here about XPS, and Office electronic paper output in general, in coming weeks.

What about Publisher? A few blogs have started wondering when we were going to speak up on our plans. That’s my job (among other hats I wear) and it’s time to start. We do have an exciting Publisher release in the pipeline as part of Office “12".

I am the lead program manager for Microsoft Publisher on the Microsoft Office Authoring team. This means my work neighbourhood is a veritable bloggers' row. Brian Jones, Chris Pratley, Owen Braun, Cyndy Wessling and Joe Friend all sit in adjacent offices. The peer pressure to blog has become overwhelming. More importantly, we are at the stage with Office “12” (yes, we are still referring to it by the codename) where I can start telling you about what we are doing in areas I work on and bring you into the feedback loop.

My intent in this blog is to cover the range of topics in Office that are important to me, including Publisher, small business marketing communications, Save as PDF and any other topics that come up where I feel I know enough to be dangerous.

This blog is all about your feedback. What excites or concerns you about what we are delivering in my parts of Office “12”? What are the new scenarios that you expect this new release to open up for you? What are the burning questions (on-topic, please) that you would like to have me answer?

My own first burning question for this blog to answer: are there Publisher users out there with time to read blogs? (That’s an area of customer research where we don’t have much data.) If so, I am looking forward to this conversation.