Office 2013 to Feature XML Support
Microsoft has been threatened by the rise of other dominant Silicon Valley companies and they were looking to consolidate their position as one of the more dominant companies of the valley. Office 2013, one of the most anticipated packages from Microsoft, will feature full XML support when it is released. This might not be a surprise to many experts considering this was something that Microsoft had planned to do with Office 2010 itself. It looks like Microsoft is not holding back this time and if you are enrolled in, or planning to enroll in XML training courses, you can be assured of an upper hand in user capabilities when Office 2013 is released.
One of the reasons why Microsoft has included full XML support is the standardization of the formats in which documents are outputted. When Microsoft pushed forward its .doc format as the standard worldwide, it was met by a lot of opposition from the other major IT players, especially IBM. IBM has always advocated the usage of the ODF format and it is not surprising that they opposed Microsoft’s push to standardize the .doc format.
Microsoft’s effort by the introduction of Open Office was also not successful as the features were not as comprehensive as in Office. Although you might feel that this is not such a big issue, it is indeed highly significant. Almost all organizations moved from paper to the digital version and the company which ruled the document digitization spree would generate huge business and consequently, profits.
Principal program manager for Microsoft, Jim Thatcher, announced this news in the penultimate week of August in Microsoft’s official blog. He also hinted at a new feature called ‘PDF Reflow’ that would allow users to generate PDF documents that can be edited and saved. But he was also quick to point out that this was not intended as a competition to Adobe, but rather as a more flexible option to the users.
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Andrea says
I still use Office 2007 and so I use both Outlook and Excel. I was under the impression that both these programs were already pretty compatible with the XML language. Does this mean it will get even easier to transfer and manage data from these programs to web based databases such as My SQL? I certainly hope so because I work a lot with Word Press and Joomla content management systems.
Terry says
It is never a good idea to mix syntax with semantics. When comparing JSON with XML this is what first came to my mind. XML provides a syntactical as well as a semi-semantical layer for data transfer. And that makes it a complicated choice. But that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is more to the story and at stake is the simple way of doing things.