Microsoft going to XML as default file format in Office 12

Microsoft said Thursday that XML would be the default file format for three applications when it ships Office 12 late next year.

The company said its new Microsoft Office Open XML Formats would be supported in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Those three applications will have new file extensions that end with an ‘x’ to designate they are XML-based: .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx.

The big picture for end-users is that Microsoft is trying to take the shackles off its desktop Office applications and use XML to open the data created within those applications to back-end systems, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications, and to inject the data into business process workflows.

The XML file formats are the first announced changes that are related to “The New World of Work” strategy that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates laid out last month at his annual CEO Summit.

“They are kind of breaking down these historical things that were largely distinct applications and now looking at the Office engines, word processing, spreadsheets or forms generation and saying they should be components and services that can be used everywhere,” says Peter O’Kelly, an analyst with the Burton Group. “No longer do you need to have the full Word application or Word viewer to do something useful with Word documents. It opens up a new world of things for people who are tying applications that are based on Office into back-end systems. It’s not that you couldn't do it before but now it will be much easier.”

To sidestep the incompatibility problems Microsoft created in 1997 when it changed Office file formats, the company will offer free updates to Office 2000, XP and 2003 to support the new file formats. It also will offer a conversion tool that will allow users to update their files in bulk to the new XML-based format.

Office also will compress stored XML documents using the ZIP utility, including WinZip that ships with Windows. Support for ZIP means the XML files can be opened without the corresponding Office application. This also will reduce file storage issues.

For users who don’t want XML formats, the defaults in Office 12, the code name for the next version of the productivity applications, can be set to the original binary file formats.

Microsoft already supports XML-based file formats for Word and Excel in Office 2003, but they are not set as the default format and they are not as complete as the newer formats. For example, pivot tables are not supported in the XML-based Excel format in Office 2003. Office 2003’s InfoPath application also supports XML.

In addition, Microsoft’s early XML formats were not well documented. Microsoft plans to fully document the Open XML Formats and to provide it to developers and others royalty-free for both reading and writing.

“The way people use documents today is extremely different from when we developed our first file formats,” says Jean Paoli, senior director of XML architecture for Microsoft and the co-creator of XML 1.0. “What people do today is integration between documents and back-end processes. You are creating information and then you can give it to back-end process to parse the document and find the information in it. Or the opposite, you have a back-end process and you can generate documents and send them to somebody.” For example, a database could format an invoice as part of a Word document and print it.