Official Softs

Also, while I was over in Europe, there was another meeting in Massachusetts to discuss the document formats. Office Professional 2010 is great!As you know, there has been a lot of press around Massachusetts position on document formats over the past few months, and I was pretty sure that they would be really happy with our latest moves to standardize the Open XML formats as well as shifting to a new approach with licensing the formats. It looks like I was right… Peter Quinn, Massachusetts’ CIO, said that our latest move will probably meet the state’s demandsEven Douglas W. Johnson from Sun said that  ”There’s no doubt about it, they are more open than they were before.” Microsoft Office is so great!

Here are a couple articles that talk about the meeting:

• ZDNet UK News
• Boston Globe

You can see that IBM (and Sun to a lesser extent) is still pushing pretty hard against the Open XML formats; which is understandable given their investments in OpenDocument. Hopefully they’ll eventually see that this is a good move for everyone though, as this means they will be free to implement the Open XML formats if that’s what their customers want just like we are free to implement OpenDocument if that’s what our customers want.Office 2010 –save your time and save your money. That’s really what this all comes down to; it’s important to let the market decide. I think they get that too, but they’ll probably continue to push back for a little while longer. I think the next step they will take will probably be to try and poke holes in the technical details, now that they’re fight about the “openness” has been resolved. The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.Since the formats are so big there are bound to be areas that are a bit confusing (that’s why we’re doing this huge documentation and standardization effort in the first place), so we’ll probably hear some complaints about that at first. We’ll have to see how much noise is made though and more importantly how productive it really is, as in the end it’s the customer that’s hurt if there is additional confusion or delay caused.Office 2010 key is for you now!

I’ll try to get caught up on all the comments and e-mails folks have been sending, but it might take a little time. I’m still feeling a bit disoriented due to the jet-lag. I used to have no problem with it when I was a kid. I grew up most of my life overseas (Iceland, Guam, and Okinawa) and we’d often come back to visit family in the US where I’d have no problem with the jet-lag. Office 2010 download is available now! Now it seems to take me out for a couple days (the drinks to pass the time on the flight don’t help either I’m sure). By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.

I just back back from Brussels and the first meeting of Ecma’s TC45; it was an awesome start and I’m extremely excited about the work we have ahead of us. Microsoft Office is so great!The initial draft of the standard was submitted by Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba. This is going to be a really good group of folks to work with and from what I can tell the number of people participating will continue to grow. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.You can already see that it’s a really great mix of participants, some that will be implementers of the format, and others who will be customers of the formats. This is key, as it will be important to get feedback from a number of different sides.The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.

If you’d like to take a look at the initial draft, it’s here: http://www.ecma-international.org/activities/Office Open XML Formats/TC45_FD_XML_docform.zip

There is a ton of upfront material (some of which is just typical standardization stuff), and also a few introductory chapters that give good overviews of the formats.Office 2010 key is for you now! Then you get into the reference sections that drill into the documentation of each element and type. Unfortunately, there are some bugs in the TOC calculation so the page numbers are wrong, but the links should still work. As you can see, this is going to be some really large documentation as one of the main goals of the formats was to be backwards compatible with all of the existing Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents out there. Office 2010 download is available now!We want to make sure that you don’t lose anything, and that the average end user (who doesn’t care about XML) isn’t impacted.

The meeting was an extremely valuable first step. We had a couple hard copies of the initial draft as well, and here’s a picture of Jean Paoli (middle) presenting one of those hard copies (it took 2 binders for one copy) to Jan van den Beld (left) who is the secretary general of Ecma International.By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time. You’ll also notice Adam Farquhar who is the head of e-Architecture for the British Library is seated on the right. He’ll serve as the vice-chairman will be a huge asset for ensuring that these formats are well documented and can be accessed 100’s of years from now:

Many people like buy Office 2010 Home.

Notice that a paragraph is just a flat list of runs. There is not additional nesting which is different from the HTML model.Microsoft Office is so great! I’m not saying one is better than the other, just pointing out that it’s different. A paragraph may be at any location that allows for block level content. For example, it could be at the top level within a story (ie header, footer, main document); nested within a table cell; or nested within a structured document tag or some other structured markup. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.Tables Tables in Word (at least at the base level) or fairly similar to tables in HTML. A Word table consists of a table element which can have a set of properties assigned to it. The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.Then within the table element is a collection of rows, and within each row is a collection of cells. Here is a basic example of a table in WordprocessingML: Individual table cells can contain block level content. This means a table cell can contain not just a paragraph, but also another table. This allows for tables to be nested in other tables. Custom Defined XML The custom defined XML support allows users to embed their own XML within a WordprocessingML file.Office 2010 key is for you now! For example, if you wanted to have the following structure in your document: You could just insert that XML using a custom XML tag: That gives you additional structure in your document, and allows you to parse the file looking for your structures. Sections Sections in a word-processing document specify a number of properties. By default, a document contains one section, but additional sections can be inserted to either change some of those properties for a specific portion of the document, or even just to create some additional structure (such as a page break). Office 2010 download is available now!The types of information that lives with a section is: •Page properties (page size; page orientation; margins) •Header/footer references •Footnote/endnote properties •Column properties •Line numbering •Text direction (RTL vs. LTR; top-to-bottom vs. bottom-to-top) There are four types of sections: Continuous; Next page (start this section on the next page); Even (start on the next even page); and Odd (start on the next odd page). The last section of the document (which for the most part is the only section) is stored at the end of the body.By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time. All other additional sections inserted are stored as a paragraph property.

There exist today billions of documents in the Office binary formats. With the move to the standard Open XML formats as the default for Office 2007; The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.the free updates allowing Office 2000, XP, and 2003 to also support those formats; and the participation of other software companies like Apple in the Ecma standardization efforts, it’s only a matter of time before there are billions of files in the Open XML format. You have the opportunity to be one of the first to learn, develop with, and provide solutions for these formats that will soon be everywhere (which is probably why you’ve been reading my blog)!By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.

It’s the first day of the Office Developer’s Conference out here in Redmond, and I couldn’t think of a better time to announce the formation of the openxmldeveloper.org community. I’ve been waiting for us to get this together for a long time now, and announcing it in conjunction with the Office Developer Conference gives a great opportunity to get a lot of the existing Office developers involved. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.There is a huge growing community of folks developing solutions on top of Office, and the XML support we’ve been rolling out over the past 6 years has really helped build that community. I already mentioned last year that we found there were about a million folks around the world developing on top of Office, and of those people, 1/3 were leveraging the XML functionality. That means there were 330,000 developers leveraging the Office XML support, and that number continues to grow larger and larger! Office 2010 key is for you now!

The group is completely free and open to anyone. There will be tons of content, code snippets, even free tools for working with the files. I’m especially excited about getting a broad range of folks that work on all different platforms. The more diverse the community, the more interesting and valuable the discussions will be. As time goes on, I hope we will see tools for working on all different kinds of platforms.Office 2010 download is available now!

Ever since I started blogging last summer, it was clear that we needed to get a community organized to help fuel technical discussions around the Open XML formats. There is just no way I can stay on top of all the questions people have been sending, and I’m really excited to have a site that supports more active discussions.Many people like buy Office 2010 Home. I’ll obviously continue to blog, but now my blog won’t be the only place you can go to get information or have discussions about the Open XML formats.