New XML-based file formats will be the defaults for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in the next version of Microsoft's market-dominant Office productivity suite, the company announced today.
Code-named Office 12, the next version of Office is expected to go into beta testing next fall and should ship sometime in the second half of 2006, according to Chris Capossela, corporate vice president for Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group.
The Microsoft Office Open XML formats will be based on Microsoft-defined XML schemas for each application. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, a specification developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, originally to facilitate the creation of customized Web documents. In contrast to HTML, which is a set of predefined tags that dictate the look of a document, XML allows document creators to specify their own tags. This is done in a schema.
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