I had one of the most bizarre meetings of my career today: Chris Capossela of Microsoft came by to pitch Microsoft Office 12's new file format. How thrilling!
The weird thing is, though, it is an important announcement. Microsoft got soundly spanked last time they changed Office file formats, so I can understand the company trying to get the word out on this change before it actually takes place.
The change is this: Office 12, which comes out sometime in the back half of 2006, will, by default, save files in XML format. The XML schema will be published, and use of it will be royalty-free. In theory, this will enable other parties to develop applications that read and write Office files, without requiring the Office applications. Word and Excel from Office 2003 (the current version) already can read and write XML files, but by default they use the creaky binary format that's hard for other apps to decipher. Office 12 will add Powerpoint to the list of apps that can write XML files, and it will also continue to support .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT files. There's more on News.com.
There are a lot of open issues still. Mac support? Unknown. Update: Yes it will. Outlook using XML? Not likely. Will Access write XML? Highly unlikely. How about Visio and OneNote -- will they be able to read these XML files? Also unknown.
Microsoft moving to an open (or, at least, openly published) document format is a very important move. But this is an interim step, since it looks like it will be several years before all the Microsoft productivity applications are able to interoperate using XML.
