Office Professional Edition 2003 can help you and your organization communicate information with immediacy and impact. You can create powerful connections between people, information, and processes by using the latest Office programs.
Product Features
Microsoft Office Word 2003
Word 2003 now supports the creation of XML documents (Figure), but this feature isn’t really designed as a replacement for the standard DOC format. Instead, administrators and power users can create their own XML schemas for Word documents, allowing users to enter information into a pre-formatted template or structured document. This makes it easier to take data created in Word and share it with Web services that understand XML. Word’s support for XML, called WordML, is complete: Every Word formatting option is available, and users can roundtrip Word documents–complete with formatting–from the application, to a Web service, and back again, without losing anything. “XML support in Word is not about document creation,” Marks told me. “Instead, it’s about tracing information that can be shared. It’s not a document format, but rather a data format. In Word, we have a roundtrippable XML format, so you can save it out, say to a a SQL Server. From there, you can perform enterprise-wide searches of data created in Word, something that was impossible or laborious before.”
Microsoft Office Excel 2003Like Word, Excel (Figure) also supports the ability to save as XML, but because some of Excel’s functionality doesn’t map very well to XML, it’s not as complete as the support in Word. "Excel’s support of XML is more limited," Marks said. "In terms of a native XML format, it’s not 100 percent roundtrippable, because some of the more complex functionality wont work. XML is more two dimensional than Excel, if you will, whereas Excel can look at data in a three dimensional way." Marks noted that the XML support in Word and Excel was best combined with a company-specific XML schema that was created by a developer in Visual Studio .NET 2003 or a similar tool. For example, you might create a resume schema, or use one of the several industry-standard resume schemas that are currently available.
Like Word, Excel (Figure) also supports the ability to save as XML, but because some of Excel’s functionality doesn’t map very well to XML, it’s not as complete as the support in Word. "Excel’s support of XML is more limited,"
Marks said. "In terms of a native XML format, it’s not 100 percent roundtrippable, because some of the more complex functionality wont work. XML is more two dimensional than Excel, if you will, whereas Excel can look at data in a three dimensional way." Marks noted that the XML support in Word and Excel was best combined with a company-specific XML schema that was created by a developer in Visual Studio .NET 2003 or a similar tool.
For example, you might create a resume schema, or use one of the several industry-standard resume schemas that are currently available.
“When you save as XML, you have two options. First, you can save the entire document as an XML file which is both wordML, including the formatting and so on, and your custom defined resume schema, all in one document. This document will be much bigger than the equivalent Word document. Second, if you just want the resume data, you can choose to save just as a simple, clean XML file that doesn’t include any information about formatting. You can more easily share this file with other programs.”
On the other end, Excel is able to interpret any customer-defined XML schema, meaning you can load XML into Excel and render it as a spreadsheet, chart or graph.
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003
PowerPoint includes a number of interesting new features. In addition to roundtrip-reviewing using Outlook, PowerPoint users can now take advantage of new animation effects, organization charts, and diagram types; use new Task panes to apply layouts and designs (Figure), use sounds and animations in Web-published presentations, and take advantage of the document recovery features Word and Excel got in Office XP.
Microsoft Office Access 2003
Unlike Beta 1, Access 2003 Beta 2 (Figure) ships with MSDE 2000 SP3, allowing you to create SQL Server-based database projects. Access also sports limited XML support by letting users extract data from multiple tables in a database and export the data in a customer-defined XML schema.
