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.