Continued support for Office 2003 XML schemas

I've had a few folks ask this question so I figured I'd just quickly call it out. As we've been discussing, we will have new XML formats for Office '12' in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The new Word XML format is really similar to the XML format in Word 2003. The Excel format is actually a more significant change (as you can see if you look at the preview of the schemas posted last week)

While we are moving to new formats, we will continue to support the XML formats from Office 2003 as well. So, if you've built solutions on top of those formats, you can either migrate those into the new formats, or just continue to use the existing formats. One big advantage of using the new XML formats is that we are providing updates for Office 2000, XP, and 2003 users that gives them full read/write support for the new XML formats.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2005
  Brian - why isn't there a talk about opening up the Visio .vsd document format? Is is planned or ruled out? Visio is as important as Word/PPT/Excel for me and I am sure people will love to have that one opened up too. (I really like Visio but I think 10 times before I insert a Visio diagram into Word - tomorrow I can use OpenOffice to edit pr convert the word document into an Open Format if I feel so, but there is no such thing possible for Visio diagrams which makes me uneasy.
• Anonymous
  April 04, 2006
  I've had a few folks ask me about the XML format from Word 2003, and whether or not it would be supported...
• Anonymous
  April 11, 2006
  Brian,
  
  when will the open XML updates for office 2000 and the other versions be released for download?