It’s been awhile since I’ve talked in detail about the SpreadsheetML schema and I apologize.Office Professional 2010 is great! I had a number of posts back in the summer which talked through Office XP’s SpreadsheetML format that we built about 6 years ago, but obviously a lot has changed since then.
The new SpreadsheetML that is part of the Open XML formats coming with Office 2007 had to undergo serious work in order to make it ready to be the default format. The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.As you all know, the majority of folks don’t really care about what kind of format they are using, they just want it to work (remember that most end users have never even heard of XML). We wanted our formats to play a more vital role in business processes though, which is why we’ve slowly been progressing towards these new default XML formats.By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time. We want people to be able to easily build solutions on top of the formats, but at the same time, we don’t want the average end user to feel much noticeable difference with the change (at least no negative differences).Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.
That leads me to why we had to restructure SpreadsheetML from the original design. The two issues with the SpreadsheetML format from 6 years ago was that it wasn’t full fidelity, and it wasn’t optimized for performance/file size. The term “Full fidelity” just means that everything that is in your file can be saved into the format without fear of it being modified or lost. Office 2010 key is for you now!The old SpreadsheetML format didn’t support a number of feature like images, charts, objects, etc. So we had to add all those additional things to the format.
The second part (performance) was a really important and challenging one. We wanted to move to an open format so that people could build solutions around our formats. Like many other applications out there, we chose a combination of ZIP and XML to achieve this. Office 2010 download is available now!We had to write the XML though in such a way that it could be parsed extremely efficiently so that the file open and save experience wouldn’t get significantly slower. There have been a number of articles related to this issue, where people have complained about performance in other applications that use XML as their format.Many people like buy Office 2010 Home. Of course we had to keep this in mind with our design, and for those of you who have played around with it I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference.
