Jaa

Office '12' File Format Presentation available online (PDC)

  • Artikkeli

If you're interested in seeing the presentation I gave at PDC back in September, it's now available online: https://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/OFF/OFF304.htm#nopreload=1&autostart=1

It's about an hour and 15 mins. It's pretty much a developer level introduction to the Office '12' file formats. I show a number of demos and cover the following agenda:

  1. Demo: Example Office XML File
  2. The role we see XML playing in Office documents
  3. Demo: How to create an Office '12' document from scratch
  4. What are the components that make up a file?
  5. Demo: Modifying an Excel spreadsheet
  6. XML Data Store (I'm really excited about this; I'm have more info on this in future posts)
  7. Developing against the formats
  8. Demo: Example server side solutions that act on the formats

If you get a chance, please take a look. It really should help you understand more about the formats and how you can work with them.

-Brian

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2005
    http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/OFF/OFF304.htm#nopreload=1&autostart=1

    Service unavailable!!

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2005
    Cannot view the presentation. Service Unavailable!

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2005
    You probably just need to change # to ? in the URL.

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2005
    The correct URL is as shown in the post, but the linked URL is incorrect. Try http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/OFF/OFF304.htm#nopreload=1&autostart=1, note the placement of the # and &.

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2005
    Hazz:

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2005
    Hazz: With regards to your comments, I really can't disagree. In particular, it's very easy to make bad decisions with technology choices (selecting tools that are unreliable, unfinished, poorly maintained, or simply don't fit your needs) and this usually goes badly. I have plently of frustrating firsthand experience with poor quality user-hostile productivity-inhibiting software and hard to maintain systems, both open source and very much closed source.

    I also agree that this isn't an appropriate venue for pushing open source. I'm personally tired of people who feel that they must push it all the time, everywhere, even when it's obviously not a good fit with someone's needs or where it's just not important. Surely using the tools that best fit all your needs is the right way to go? Myopically focusing on "open source" as your only evaluation criterion is as stupid as focusing on absolute minimum price or on how pretty the users think the user interface is.

    That said, I do think you've made one significant error that needs clarification. The license you refer to as the "open source" license is presumably the GPL - which is only one of a large number of licenses. It's one of the most restrictive, and there are a lot of open source licenses that do not impose the same requirements. It's inaccurate to say that open source licenses require you to make "anything you build on it ... 100% open source," since in fact that's only true of the smaller "Free software" (software libré) subset. In fact, Microsoft just adopted two of the less restrictive ones - a slightly altered BSD license and a an MPL-derived license - for the shared source licensing programme. As outspoken opponents of "Free software" licensing, this helps show just how wide the range in open source licensing models really is.

    I must also agree that the new XML formats are great progress. It's going to open up some very interesting possibilities in the business network I'm responsible for. I've noted before that I'm crossing every digit I have in the hopes that Office "13" will extend the same facilities to MS Publisher. There are a lot of interesting possibilities here.

    --
    Craig Ringer

  • Anonymous
    October 30, 2005
    http://www.nforce.nl/index.php?switchto=nfos&menu=quicknav&item=viewnfo&id=97647

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2005
    After several attempts to view this presentation, I finally gave up. It always crashes IE after just a few minutes.

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2005
    I've been reading your blog for quite a while now, and I'm excited about the new XML format. Can you please comment on the performance of the new Office 12 XML format? With Office 2003 for example, a large workbook can be opened in few seconds in native XLS format, but it takes 10 to 15 minutes if it is in the Office 2K3's XML format. I hope Microsoft will improve this since it will be the native format from there on. In addition, can we also expect that the patch for Office XP and 2K3 also patch the performance issue instead of just enabling read/write capability?

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2005
    Thanks for all the comments. I'm sorry if some folks weren't able to watch it. One thing that might work better is to go follow this link: http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/OFF/OFF304.htm
    (You'll need to wait for all the material to download before it will play).

    William, it's really too early to provide actual numbers on what the performance will be as we haven't yet started working on the optimizations around file I/O. The formats will definitely be much faster than the SpreadsheetML format from Excel 2003 though, I can definitely say that.

    The performance of opening these new formats in older versions that use the free updates will be slower than opening the same files in Office '12'. The reason for that is that we actually need to open the file and translate it so that the older version will understand it. That means it will be slower (but no numbers yet on that).

    An area where you'll see improvements is in opening a file over the network. Since the files are so much smaller, the time to transmit the file will be much less.

    Perf is a really big deal to us, and we're going to work hard over the upcoming months to make sure the new formats won't cause pain to end users.

    -Brian

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2005
    If the Office 12 XML formats have features that Microsoft believes are technically superior to those in the OASIS standard OpenDocument 1.0, why didn't it participate in the creation of that standard as it was invited to on many occasions? I've got a bunch of users still on Office 2000, but why I should pay full price to upgrade them to Office 11 or 12 just so they can be locked into a file format controlled solely by Microsoft when I can now choose software that uses formats that have gone through the standards process and are available under an open license? How could I even begin to justify buying Office under those circumstances? I'm not trying to be anti-MS as I'm a long-time Office user, but I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation from MS that would answer any of these questions.

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2005
    Hi Peter, that is a great question. There has been a lot of news recently around that format, so I understand why you'd ask the question. The move to open XML formats is a really great move for any application. The OpenDocument format is a modification of Sun's legacy StarOffice file format. Sun brought forward the StarOffice file format which was then discussed and documented at OASIS and became OpenDocument. We already had the WordprocessingML format which fully supported all legacy Word documents and that's what we've based our new formats on. Our number one priority was compatibility our customers' legacy files. Our formats are 100% compatible with the existing binary files and are available under a royalty free license which means you have complete control over your files.

    In addition, as I've discussed before you don't need to pay any money to upgrade if you want to use the new formats: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/10/11/479808.aspx
    There are free updates to the past 3 versions of Office which allow them to read and write the new XML formats.

    -Brian

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2005
    yucky :

  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2005
    Craig - thanks for the clarification about the GPL and the breadth of other open licenses available.

    Yuki - thanks for your 'comments', it is an interesting statistic (if verifiable) that 99% of programmers code is written for other than software vendors.

    Hazz
    Business Analyst

  • Anonymous
    November 03, 2005
    Brian,
    One area where the MS formats really seem to shine is the DataStore portion you demo'd at the PDC. According to http://xml.openoffice.org/faq.html (point #5), this is not possible in the OpenDocument formats.

    This one feature finally makes possible the automated document generation system I've been scheming up for my organization for the past 4 years.

    I'd like to know more about this feature. In your presentation, you said "I've created a schema for this data set that I've just dropped into this file and it's just sitting there inside of this package and travels inside this file..." but you only showed the actual data file...you never mentioned a schema except for that one brief moment.

    Question 1: Is this feature a take-off of the custom schema feature in Word 2003?

    Question 2: Can multiple data files be used? For example, data from two or more disperate database tables could not be used in a mail-merge. Can this now be accomplished using the DataStore part?

    Question 3: Can you please post a copy of the demo'd document file (SaleOfPropertyPITxt.docx)?

    Thanks
    Darryl

  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2005
    what about support for WordML to XSL-FO?

  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2005
    Hey Darryl, I'm really excited about the custom defined schema support we have in Office 12. The support in 2003 was a great first step, and I think we've definitely built on that momentum. I'll post more about the ways you can integrate the data with the presentation... to answer your questions though:

    1. There are actually two pieces to this. The first is the support for custom defined XML files to be placed in the ZIP package. I talk about this here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11/04/489223.aspx

    The second piece to that is the ability to map nodes from the custom XML into the surface of the document via content controls. The content controls are based on the same technology we used for the custom schema support in 2003, and I'll talk more about that in future posts.

    2. You can place as many XML files as you want into the ZIP package. As I discuss in that post I mentioned; we allow you to put your own XML files into the ZIP package and we'll load those into memory when the document is opened and provide programatic access. There is no direct support for integrating the items in the datastore with the mailmerge functionality though. You could definitely do this programatically if you wanted. Another alternative is to use the content controls and map them to the different nodes in the seperate data tables.

    3. I'll try to get a copy up quickly after Beta 1 is released (I want to use the most up to date build).

    ---

    Sagi, we do not support XSL-FO directly, but there are a number of tools out there that have this support. I've talked about this in previous blog entries:
    http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/10/20/483161.aspx
    http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/08/11/450539.aspx

    -Brian

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2005
    I watched some webcasts about VSTO and Word/Excel and it looks great.

    Unfortunately I am not finding much stuff regarding PowerPoint support, so I wonder whether that will be also supported. What I need to do is to create a ppt file in the server side (aspx) and create some charts in it, pulling the data out from a dataset.

    Would that be possible or am I stuck with Office automation for a few years more?

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2005
    Hey Rodrigo, PowerPoint is also moving to a new XML file format. So you can just use standard ZIP and XML to parse and generate powerpoint presentations.

    You can get a preview of the schemas here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=15805380-f2c0-4b80-9ad1-2cb0c300aef9&displaylang=en

    There are two download choices for you. You can get them packaged as an msi, or as a zip file.

    -Brian

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