Doug’s World

Learning About Office 12

2006 is going to be a big year for Microsoft Office, and I’m going to cover a lot of the details right here. Office 12 will ship later in the year, and it will be the biggest, boldest upgrade of Office ever. The user interface has been radically simplified, the developer APIs are much more open and robust, and the file formats are more open and much harder to accidentally corrupt. Office is now a set of server products as well as desktop client applications, and that opens up a whole new world of opportunities for independent software vendors (ISVs).

If you’re interested in learning more about what’s coming, here are a few links worth checking out:

Jensen Harris, a Lead Program Manager on Office 12, has an excellent list of 30 articles about the Office 12 user interface on his blog.

One of the key changes in Office 12 is the XML file formats. The documents you create in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are saved as a bunch of XML files in a ZIP package, and this opens open many creative possibilities for developers. For one thing, you can programmatically create, read and modify documents without even running the Office software, using simple industry-standard tools like PKZIP and Notepad.

The best demos of the XML file format that I’ve seen were done by Brian Jones, another Program Manager working on Office. Brian used to work on the Word team and is now focused on the XML file formats in general. Check out his blog for lots of great information about how the new XML formats work.

And for the official word on all things Office, check out Microsoft’s Office 12 preview site.

Those links are good places to start, and in January I’ll be posting a lot more links, screen shots, code samples, and other Office 12 info right here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 11:01 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.