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Microsoft Office Open XML Formats

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Scoble dropped the hint, and Mary Jo Foley spilled the beans. C|New has also jumped the gun on this. There's a piece on Channel 9 over here, and it won't be long before the official press release is here. (I waited more than 10 minutes past the deadline, folks.) Lastly, Brian Jones, PM in the Win Office team, has a post here.

Just in case you're wondering about the story with Mac Office 12, Mac Office 12 will support the new file formats as well. Also, as with Win Office, we'll be producing converters for Office X and Office 2004. Some details have yet to be fully finalized, but we expect to ship converters that will provide full round-trip support for the new file formats in Office X and Office 2004.

For us in Mac BU, this represents an enormous undertaking on two fronts. Win Office is already well ahead of Mac Office in terms of support for XML, and the state of XML parsing on Panther is, well, less than desirable (among other things, the version of libXML that ships on Panther doesn't support SAX 2.0's namespace changes).

The other is that, for the first time in the history of Office, we're attempting to ship a major architectural change that's being simultaneously implemented by both the Windows and Macintosh groups as separate business units. This means that Mac Office 12 will ship some time after Win Office 12, however I'm not at liberty to discuss projected ship dates or the currently planned delta between Win Office 12 and Mac Office 12.

Those of you who are interested in this from a software engineering point of view, the process is really rather simple. Since the Win Office team already has a lead in the development work, we in Mac Office will take snapshots of their code and integrate those snapshots into our code base. With the exception of a few minor details and any bug fixes unique to the Mac platform (almost all of which, I guarantee, will involve byte-sex issues), the code that supports the new file format will be virtually identical between the various Win Office and Mac Office applications. The challenge is interesting enough, that I might even end up writing a white paper on the topic. We'll see.

I'm intimately involved with this effort as far as Mac Word is concerned. As both time and public information restrictions permit, I'll try to keep people informed. At this time, I can tell you that Mac Word 12 currently speaks XML almost as well as Win Word 2003. I can't speak for either Excel or PowerPoint.

 

Rick

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    kind of curious why you mentioned libXML in Panther. Mostly since Mac Office has been known to roll its own if the OS doesn't support it or if the OS's support doesn't mesh well with the requirements of Word. Not especially the fake genie effect by creating an overlay window, getting an image of the window, and animating that image in the overlay window. And the lack of using an actual menu in Word's formatting palette (really wish I knew why that was, it causes me huge headaches).

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    <p>I am definately glad that will we will be getting this with the next version of Word for Mac.<p> Brian Jones has <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/06/01/424085.aspx">said</a> that Office 2000/XP/2003 will get updates to support the new file formats - can we expect this for Office X/2004 as well?

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    Actually, Mary Jo Foley waited until she had permission. CNET and Reuters were out first.

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    Rick,

    Does this mean Word/Mac will support user-defined native XML for tagging the content itself (as Word/XP does), not just XML as an alternative file format?

    Exciting!

    Ben

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    I strongly second the request for some level of SharePoint support in Mac Office 12. We're beginning to use SharePoint 2.0 within my enterprise and we have two problems: Office 2000 users and Mac users. Anything you folks can do build in some minimal SharePoint support would be terrific.

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    Troy, for now, the best way to give feedback is via the various product newsgroups:

    http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups

    Ben, Mac Word will have at least some support for external schemas, but the precise details are still up in the air. I really can't say more than that.

    Rick

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2005
    Please, can we have snazzier file icons? :-)

    //k

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    I strongly agree with the Sharepoint Access! Gives us some equal usage here microsoft! While you are added, please revamp Entourage to be more Outlook like (we desperate miss some Outlook features here at our work!)

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Rick,

    You've referred only to Panthe, not Tiger. I'm sure that Mac Office 12 will have to support Panther, Tiger, and OS 10.5-to-come, so I guess you have to design it to work with the earliest such system you support, but does Tiger offer no improvement? If the improvement is really significant, and would save you a lot of work, might it not make sense to design around that and require OS 10.4 for MacOffice 12? The sort of time-scale you're disucussing here (WinOffice 12 due out very end of 2006, MacOffice lagging significantly behind, meaning 2007) probably means OS 10.5 coming out at around the same time as Mac Office 12. I guess the marketing people don't want to make too many hurdles to upgrades, but it still might be a reasonable requirement to expect Tiger. Or does Tiger not really help much here?

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    It seems the sizzle on these announcements is the "open" part. But will these file formats really be "open?" The Slashdot crowd has weighed in with some compelling reasons to suspect that there is no substantive change in Microsoft's corporate culture. Read and decide.

    http://slashdot.org/articles/05/06/02/1231253.shtml?tid=109&tid=95&tid=1

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Rick:

    Could you provide pointers to the formal specs for the "Microsoft Office Open XML Formats"? Googling on that phrase yields a good number of press releases, but nothing much useful in the way of useful content for developers.

    TIA. - Will

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Wow, I keep getting errors on blogs.msdn.com today. Guess the slashdotting isn't doing CS any good?

    Anyway, I'm still a newbie to OS X development. Are libxml and libxml2 the same thing? If not why not use libxml2? I can see why you wouldn't use NSXmlParser if it's a Cocoa only object. But CoreFoundation has a CFXmlParser available? Is that just a wrapper for libxml?

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Paul,

    The version of libXML on Tiger is 2.6.16 (according to the headers), so the state of XML parsing is significantly improved. However, libXML has other problems when we start thinking about using it in Office. The discussion is a bit involved. If you really want to know, drop me an e-mail.

    The decision with respect to XML parsing, however, is independent of what OS we decide to require for Office 12. We're going to ship converters for Office X and Office 2004, and these will need to parse XML at the same level as Office 12. We'd have customers taking our heads off if we also told Office X and Office 2004 users that they also had to upgrade to Tiger.


    Will,

    There are links in Brian Jones' post, and one of them is a white paper for developers. That's all I know of right now. For more developer information, I'd suggest keeping an eye on John Durant's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Scott,

    When I use "libXML", I'm speaking of libxml2. If that's not common usage, then I apologize.

    As for the Core Foundation XML parser, it's even less robust than libXML. It's basically not much more than the minimum you'd need in order to read a .plist.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Does this mean that other word processors will find it easier to include MS compatibility? Most are pretty good now, but still, an fully open format would be huge. I double-dog dare you guys to lure me away from Nisus. (Which is to say, if Office 12 is good enough I really might switch back to MS. Proper market competition is such a good thing -- it's good to see MS embracing it, a little.)

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    rick, could this...

    ...from a software engineering point of view, the process is really rather simple. Since the Win Office team already has a lead in the development work, we in Mac Office will take snapshots of their code and integrate those snapshots into our code base...

    ...also apply to an "Outlook 12" for Mac OS X. The positive features of Outlook 2001 are truely needed on the OS X platform and Entourage X/2004 just doesn't cut it in an Exchange envoronment.

    tx,
    tb.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Adam Bosworth on Ajax Nice perspective on why it didn&amp;#8217;t take off back then, but does now (tags: web) TSS interviews Hani Suleiman, the Bile Blogger Some fun and a lot of valid points (tags: java) MS Office Mac will support XML, too I have no idea how usable it&amp;#8217;s going to be, but at least it&amp;#8217;s cross-platform (tags:...

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Now, what happens with IRM'd Office 12 Documents? That needs to have the correct answer, and that answer does NOT consist of "Use Windows".

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Thank you MacOffice guys! Your division doesn't get enuf luv from the Mac community. Count on my getting the next Office upgrade for the Mac.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2005
    One thing i would love to see in the new Mac Office 12 along the new XML file formats is a well defined OLE Automation interface ;)

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2005
    Hello Rick,

    I commented here after the intro of Mac Office 2004 to express my disappointment that it did not include XML (for Word--I'm talking primarily about Word in these comments) support in that version. I am VERY happy to hear that "Office 12" for the Mac will include the new XML file format.

    I'm writing to voice my concern, though, and lobby for the ability in the Mac version to do at least what the Windows 2003 version does now, namely, allow creation of documents based on author-created (i.e., anything apart from the WordML) DTDs and schemas).

    The apparent openness of the new XML file format will largely go to waste on the Mac platform if there is no support for external DTDs. I think the new file fomrat is a very smart move for MS, and will do what it's intended to, i.e., make the Office platform relevant again, and in a new way. But if people can't exchange XML in the XML applications they need (i.e., TEI) then the point of the XML format is largely lost. Universities are now very busy creating institutional repositories, and having Word documents in XML format will be a tremendous boon to that effort. However, if external DTD/Schema support is not available for the Mac, institution-wide workflows will not be able to implement a workflow around Office 12.

    On the other hand, if there is support for this for Macs as well as Windows verisons, many libraries will rejoice at the prospect of being able to have faculty generate XML in the required XML application at the point of content-creation. You seem to imply that the new Mac version, while following the Windows verison, might come sooner than new versions of Office have appeared in the past, in order to introduce the new file format across platforms--and that would be very welcome as well.

    Congratulations to you and MS for taking this direction.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2005
    I agree with Roysna. Who cares about the "Standard Panther Install." Let's talk about the Standard TIGER install. By the time Mac Office 12 finally ships - Panther will be archaic.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2005
    Is that any relation to the Great Schism between the Big and Little sects of Endianity?

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2005
    Rick Schaut of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit describes plans for supporting Microsoft's XML formats. Office v. X and Office 2004 will get converters to read and write these formats. See Microsoft's Office 2003 XML page for more information on Microsoft's...

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2005
    Rumors are flying that Apple will announce a switch to Intel processors on Monday. This wouldn't surprise...

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2005
    Hey folks. Let me start off by saying I am a fellow MacBU employee, just like Rick. Unlike Rick, I am not a developer but a tester at MacBU.

    I worked on Office 2001, X, 2004, and I am now working on our Exchange update for Entourage 2004.

    First off, for the user complaining about Chinese support on office, let me ask: Which version of Office are you running? Office 2004 comes with Unicode support. While Chinese is not one of our officially supported language, I know that Chinese characters do work. Perhaps you are lacking a font on your Mac that can display Chinese characters? Perhaps you are using an older (Office X) version of Office that does not have unicode support.

    As for Entourage and Exchange. We made great strides forward with Entourage 2004 when it comes to Exchange support. The currect Exchange update we are working on pushes forward again. This is not some puny update. This is a massive update that supports things like GAL, Multiple Calendars and Address Books, improved Syncing, as well as vastly improve public folder support. That is just the tip of it too. This update is scheduled to release in the near future, so keep your eye out for it. (And yes it is free for all Office 2004 users)

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2005
    Andrew and Cyrus,

    Well, today's big announcement from gives me the perfect opportunity to answer that question. It's in today's post.

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    June 15, 2005
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