Office 12 to go all-XML, all the time

Microsoft Office 1 Minute

Once again, Mary Jo Foley scoops everyone with a two-hour head start on Microsoft’s big Office announcement:

Microsoft continues to slowly trickle out bits of information about its Office 12 suite. On Thursday the company will announce that it plans to make XML-based file formats the default in the version of Office due to ship in the latter half of 2006.

Microsoft is introducing the new formats as part of Office 12, officials said, and will share more details about them at next week’s Tech Ed 2005 conference in Orlando, Fla.

The new Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats will be designated as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx , respectively. Microsoft is referring to the family of new formats as “Microsoft Office Open XML Formats.”

Interesting, but not world-shattering. I was holding my breath that the story was going to screw up the schedule for updating my Office book next year, but I can rest easier now.

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Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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4 thoughts on “Office 12 to go all-XML, all the time”

  1. This is a good thing and will truly extend the life of these document formats over the previous binary ones. As a writer who has more than 20 years of documents in a variety of formats (most of which sit backed-up in plain text format!), an XML/text-based format is a relief. Now for the company to come along and offer me a fast batch-conversion utility that will convert all my old Word documents to the new format!

  3. Hey Microsoft, OASIS have just approved OpenOffice.org’s OpenDocument format, which is also XML-based. Why re-invent the wheel?

    My one problem is that people using Office 12 will start sending these files out via email like they do with existing office files, and those without Office 12 will have no idea what to do with them.

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