Office 12: New File Format

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will use XML-based file formats in the “Office 12” release planned for 2006, Microsoft has announced. The new formats will allow applications other than the Office suite to more easily read and write Office documents, which will strengthen Office as a tool for document processing and help it compete in some markets. Office 12 will support the current Office binary document formats, and Microsoft will patch old versions of Office to work with the Office 12 formats, but some organizations will still be wary of any Office format change.

Compressed XML for Outside Access

According to current plans, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 12 will all save documents by default as compressed (zipped) packages. The most important part of each package will be an XML representation of the Office document’s content, which will conform to a published, Microsoft-defined XML schema. However, a package could also include XML data from applications other than Office (such as internal corporate applications), and possibly other parts: Microsoft plans to release full technical details of the new format at its June 2005 TechEd conference.