XML, of course!

Microsoft Office is the most successful productivity product in the history of computers, with over 300 million users around the world. Few of them use all of the features in Office now, so why add something new?

It wasn’t just the needs of the information worker that motivated this extraordinary enhancement to Office, it was the needs of the information itself. Thanks to the Internet, local networks, business integration and the very ubiquity of Office, key enterprise data is not available in one convenient place. Some of it is in managed central stores, but much more is in desktop systems, departmental repositories, and even in the systems of vendors and customers.

Past versions of Office have provided tools for coping with this problem, but solution implementation has been cumbersome and often required advanced development skills. That was in part because every data source typically has its own data format. In addition to accessing the information, a solution often had to decode it as well.

In the past few years, XML has emerged to solve that problem; it has become the universal information interchange representation. XML software for machine-to-machine functions is virtually standard equipment for all platforms. But until September, 2003, the only generally useful XML on the desktop was strictly in specialized products. Common productivity tools like office suites supported only specific XML document types, when they supported XML at all.

Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 changed that situation forever, by accepting any user-defined XML document as a first-class citizen. As a result, millions of desktop computers have been transformed from mere word processors into potential rich clients for Web services, editing front-ends for XML content management systems, and portals for XML-based application integration.

This book shows you how to use the XML features of Office to realize that potential. You’ll learn to share information among Office products and between Office and the rest of the XML universe.

XML in Office 2003 will make it easier to collaborate with co-workers and utilize the information resources of your enterprise and the Web.

You don’t have to be a professional developer to use the Office XML features. We’ve written this book so that office users who are comfortable with preference settings and macros will be able to tap into these resources. If you can deal with scripts – or are willing to copy and modify ours – you’ll be able to do even more. And if you are a pro, you’ll find that we don’t talk down to you: you’ll easily see the added possibilities for real program code.

And XML knowledge isn’t a prerequisite for this book either. It includes a bonus section of tutorials on XML and its related technologies, adapted from the best-selling XML Handbook.

Chapter 2 of this book is an introduction to XML that should be sufficient for learning the XML features of Office 2003. However, if you plan to use XML products other than Office, develop your own schemas, or use Office to share data with enterprise systems and Web services, you’ll want to learn more about XML.

As our readers will have differing experience with XML and different requirements for its use, there seemed no sensible way to intersperse detailed XML education with the Office XML tasks that are the focus of the book.

Instead we’ve put the detailed tutorials and references on the XML language and related standards where you can easily find them when you need them. They are in Part Three. The book’s Table of Contents and Index can guide you to specific subjects, and we also provide appropriate cross-references to them from the Office XML task chapters in Part Two.

While we chose and edited the XML tutorials to emphasize the aspects that are supported in Office, we did so fully aware that the focus of the book is on sharing information, including between Office and other systems that could have more complete XML support. For that reason, we also cover, though in less detail, XML facilities that Office does not support fully.

The Office suite is packaged and distributed in multiple editions and the XML support varies among them:

Almost all of the Office material in this book involves custom schemas. The general XML material, of course, is not product-specific.

When the book talks about “the Office products” without further qualification, it means those with XML support: Word, Excel, InfoPath, Access, and FrontPage.

Although Visio also has XML support, it is sufficiently different from the other products that we don’t cover it in the book. Its XML capabilities can be summarized as follows:

These things are mentioned here to avoid cluttering the book with disclaimers like “if you have the Professional edition you can also do this” and “all of the products (except Visio and non-XML-enabled products) can do that”.

XML in Office 2003 has three parts, consisting of 24 chapters. We won’t try to describe the full scope here, as you can easily look at the Table of Contents. But we do include some tips that will help you get the most from the book.

Part One introduces the applications of desktop XML, the XML language and technology, and the XML features of Office. Please read it first as it is the foundation for the rest of the book.

Part Two teaches the XML features of Office in detail, with working examples and step-by-step walk-throughs. Each chapter has a subtitle that indicates the level of implementation task it describes: power user or script developer. The Office product name is also included if it isn’t in the chapter title.

You can read Part Two with only Part One as background, although technical readers may want to complete the XML tutorials first; others can dip into them as needed. All of the examples used in Part Two can be found at the book’s website: www.XMLinOffice.com

There are two considerations to keep in mind regarding the examples:

The XML tutorials can be found in Part Three. We strove to keep them friendly and understandable for readers without a background in subjects not covered in this book. Tutorials whose subject matter thwarted that goal are labeled as being a tad tougher so you will know what to expect, but not to discourage you from reading them.

There is an extensive index that also serves as a “glossary-in-context”. We believe that the meaning of a term is best understood in context – in several contexts if they add to understanding, or the term has multiple meanings. Therefore, an index entry identifies the page(s) where its term is defined separately from the entry’s other pages.

Our first acknowledgment is to the people at Microsoft who brought XML to the desktop. Jean Paoli conceived the idea and spent more than three years bringing it to life.

We especially thank him and Peter Pathe, VP of Office, for the day they spent visiting Charles and showing off their brainchild. They aroused the enthusiasm that led directly to this book project.

Among the Office and InfoPath team members who helped us get the job done, we are particularly indebted to Melinda Lewison and Jeune Ji. We also thank Jacob Jaffe for supplying the InfoPath trial CDs.

Faye Gemmellaro supervised the project for the publisher; we thank her for her dedication, attention to detail, and unfailing kindness and patience.

We owe a very special thank you to Andrew Goldfarb who tackled a variety of editing and production tasks, in addition to serving as art director and artist-on-demand.

Mark Taub, our Editor-in-Chief at Prentice Hall PTR, showed enormous enthusiasm for this project from the very start. We thank him for his help, encouragement, and guidance.