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Office 2007 is Coming
publication date: Nov 20, 2006
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author/source: Terry Robson Silver IT Club
There will be some big changes in the next version of Office. The biggest changes will be in the background; these will be changes to the basic document format – known as OfficeML.
Because this is an important change we will try to cover it in some detail. It will make a difference to how Office documents can and will be used in the future.
But listen all you silver surfers it isn't essential to understand all this to be able to enjoy Office 2007 when it arrives but you will feel superior when explaining it to others.
A lot of press coverage and indeed Microsoft’s own coverage seems to assume that readers know about and care about XML, document formats and so forth. So we will go back to the basics and do some revision. It is worth it.
Document Formats
Every file on your computer has a format. This is the structure that defines how information is to be presented.
It isn’t just the words that you type that are stored in a Word file there’s a lot of additional information that has to be included if Word is to read it in the future. Apart from the words there’s the font, the font size, page size, margins. There are all the extras like comments, footnotes, embedded or linked images, charts and macros. All this information has to be stored in the file if Word is to read it correctly in the future.
You can save the document in other formats such as Rich Text Format this works fine but it will miss out a lot of the Word specific information.
Word Binary Documents
You can’t design a program to create a Word document without Microsoft’s permission. They own the binary format for Word. They will sometimes give permission. For example anti-virus companies need to know the inner workings of Word documents if they are to be able to scan your document for nasty things. In this case Microsoft will reveal the inner workings of the binary document format.
Ever since Word was created the default method of saving a file has been the binary format with a .doc extension.
Other Formats
There are many other document formats that are designed for word processing. There is Word Perfect, Rich Text Format (RTF), Microsoft Works, and many others. Even plain text files have a simple format.
However MS Word has the biggest market share by far and is the most common.
If you have ever made a web page you will have seen another example of document structure namely HTML. This is a plain text document with instructions that tell a web browser where to place words and images. The structure is publicly known and anyone can use it without charge.
When you create a document you can save it as an HTML. In the File menu there is Save as Web Page or in the Save As dialogue box you can go to Save as Type and choose Web Page. This document for example is saved as a Word file and as an HTML file. I can open one with Word and the other with any Web Browser even though both were made using Word.
XML Formats
Now imagine a sales force out and about getting information and sending it back to headquarters to the sales manager. If the costumer information was saved in Word in binary format the document would have to be opened and the customer information extracted and copied to a database or spread sheet.
With XML formats there is an alternative. The information is still saved in Word and the sales people may not notice the difference. The company adds it’s own data structure or “schema” to the Office structure so that the essential information such as the name of sales rep, the country or the amount of the quote are all “tagged” and the sales manager can extract the information without opening every document and can transfer it automatically to a database or spreadsheet.
This has huge implications for those companies who make use of it.
In the next article I will discuss what this means for the majority of Office users and why Microsoft is making the changes and of course what’s in it for them and start to look at some of the new features. Most of us moan about Microsoft at times and with good cause but I love tinkering about with Office and look forward to starting all over again.
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