With the next version of the Microsoft® Office System, Microsoft will introduce new, XML-based file formats for Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel®, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint®. With these new formats, Microsoft ensures that organizations can successfully and completely integrate the Microsoft Office System into their enterprise architectures. This change represents a large step forward in extending Microsoft’s commitment to XML, industry-standard integration technologies, and to open, published file format specifications.
The published specifications for the new Office file formats will be available with a royalty-free license, enabling anyone to freely access the full documentation and quickly learn how to integrate Office files into their solutions. The use of XML offers the benefits of greater transparency and openness than were possible with the previous binary file formats. The new formats allow Office documents to easily integrate with existing and future line-of-business systems, as the contents are now open and accessible. The new formats are also designed with long-term robustness and accessibility in mind, so that file corruptions will be easily repairable, and there is no reliance on any particular software application to provide access to the document contents. “Office 12” files will also be much more efficient, taking up far less space than the previous formats and allowing for quicker transmission times and a smaller impact on storage.
The new file formats represent a major step forward, and will be made available not only to customers who adopt “Office 12,” but also to customers using previous versions of the Microsoft Office System. Free tools will enable users of Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 to open and save to the new formats, so that everyone can benefit from this innovation.