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Office 2003 XML Review by W Boudville
Much nicer way to get at MS Office data
Hurrah! Microsoft has said for several years that it strongly supports XML. Well MS Office 2003 is one of the first major products that conforms to this. As you probably know, earlier versions read and wrote to Microsoft's own doc format. A binary format. Third party developers then had to write code to read and write files in this format. Doable, but certainly an aggravation to some, given the complexity of the format.
Which is why MS Office 2003 was eagerly awaited. Now, XML is a fully supported data format. It also lets you see in an easy and direct way the complexity of deciphering the doc format, if you had never tried to do that firsthand.
Here, the book walks you through the various XML outputs and their associated schemas. There is the usual XML verbosity. (No surprises here.) But you can now read, in plaintext, how the suite structures its code in an OO fashion. So much nicer!
Not that the book is trivial. Many examples show how a lot of XML's capabilities are used. Like namespaces, XSLT, XSL and XPath. A reassuring point is that your needs might not have to extend to all these usages. The book also has many very simple XML examples that could be germane.