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Brian Jones: Open XML Formats

I'm Brian Jones, a program manager in Office. I've been working on the XML functionality and file formats in Office for about 5 years now. In this blog, I'll mainly focus on XML in Office and the Open XML File Formats coming in the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

September 2005 - Posts

Converting WordprocessingML into HTML (for easy viewing)
Many people have asked me if there is an easy way to go from Word XML into XHTML. I've already mentioned that we have a tool available that transforms from Word 2003 XML into HTML. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=19676b18-1bcd-4852-93ba-0b5a203ea731&displaylang=en Read More...

Posted Friday, September 30, 2005 11:21 AM by BrianJones | 12 Comments

Some background information on the reasons we have moved to an XML format as the default in Office "12"
This continues to be a really good discussion and I want to thank everyone who has taken time to post their comments. I know there is a lot to read through and it can get a bit confusing at times, so I'm really glad to see so many of you are up for it. Read More...

Posted Thursday, September 29, 2005 8:36 AM by BrianJones | 48 Comments

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Follow-up on comments from the royalty-free license discussion
This continues to be a really great discussion. I think we're really starting to get somewhere. There were so many comments, I couldn't reply to all, and I figured I would break this out into a new post. Let's dig into a couple of the comments from the Read More...

Posted Sunday, September 25, 2005 6:09 PM by BrianJones | 48 Comments

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New blog on Excel '12'
David Gainer has started a blog discussing the next version of Excel. David is the GPM of the Excel team, and this should be a great blog for those of you interested in Excel. http://blogs.msdn.com/excel In David's first post, he talks about an old limitation Read More...

Posted Friday, September 23, 2005 12:51 PM by BrianJones | 17 Comments

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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 Read More...

Posted Friday, September 23, 2005 11:51 AM by BrianJones | 3 Comments

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More on the royalty-free licenses for the Microsoft Office Open XML formats
Well, now that PDC is over I've had a chance to look into the issues and comments from our discussion the previous week . There continue to be a lot of comments about the licenses that we use for the Microsoft Office Open XML formats. The questions I've Read More...

Posted Thursday, September 22, 2005 8:58 AM by BrianJones | 49 Comments

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Custom schema support in all Office "12" SKUs!
I haven't seen much mention of this yet so I wanted to call it out in case folks weren't aware yet. For Office "12", all of the XML functionality will be enabled in all SKUs. In Office 2003, the XML file formats were enabled in all versions, but the support Read More...

Posted Tuesday, September 20, 2005 8:02 PM by BrianJones | 0 Comments

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Office blogs discussing the the Office "12" User Interface
Jensen Harris has started blogging about the new Office "12" UI. Folks who attended the keynotes at PDC, got to see the first look at the new UI. From everyone I talked to, there is a lot of excitement and I heard over and over that folks can't wait to Read More...

Posted Saturday, September 17, 2005 9:35 AM by BrianJones | 7 Comments

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PDC Preview of the Office "12" schemas
Thanks to everyone that came to my PDC session yesterday on the new Office "12" file formats. We covered a lot of information around the new formats and had a number of examples of things you will be able to do now that Office has an open accessible file Read More...

Posted Wednesday, September 14, 2005 12:33 PM by BrianJones | 8 Comments

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Intro to Word XML Part 6: Locking down your XML structures
What a busy week. I've been trying to keep up with all the news while also getting ready for PDC (and still keeping up with all my regular responsibilities helping to ship Office 12). I'm heading down to PDC on Monday, and my session is Tuesday afternoon. Read More...

Posted Friday, September 09, 2005 2:31 PM by BrianJones | 9 Comments

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More on the Interoperability of the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats
Wow, there were a ton of great comments on my last post . While there were a large number of them, there were two primary themes I saw repeated. The first was that there are still a number of concerns around the true "openness" of the MS Office Open XML Read More...

Posted Monday, September 05, 2005 2:44 PM by BrianJones | 42 Comments

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