XML is a major innovation for Microsoft Office. You can now use a truly product-neutral data format with Office – and with any of the thousands of other products and systems that also support XML.

XML lets software know what your data means – not just what a particular product does with it. That means you can share Office documents more easily with other people, regardless of what those people do with them. You can also gather information from sources such as enterprise data stores or Web services, and integrate it easily into your own documents.

In this Part we show you why XML can do these and other useful things. We teach enough XML for you to understand how Office uses it (even if you have no prior XML experience), and we illustrate the XML features that are now available in the Office suite.