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Book: Office 2003 XML for Power Users (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

ISBN: 9781590592649

Publisher: Apress

Year: 2004

SINCE ITS INTRODUCTION in the late 1990s, XML has revolutionized the way data is

stored, manipulated, and shared. XML has made it possible for applications written

in different programming languages (and running on different operating systems)

to exchange any type of information. XML also allows different

organizations to “glue” together their business processes, so that a purchase order

from one company can flow seamlessly into the inventory management system of

another. At the same time, a host of XML-related standards has sprung up, defining

standards for everything from real estate listings to vector graphics.

Of course, along with all these remarkable developments is one significant

catch. If you want to harness the full features of XML, you need to write your own

software. For example, if you want to funnel an expense report into an automated

payment system, you need to create an application that can read the original format

of the expense report (which might be Microsoft Excel or Word), and manually

convert it into the appropriate XML representation. This type of application is

difficult to create and even more difficult to maintain. It’s also extremely fragile,

meaning that minor changes in the layout of the source document can easily lead

to conversion errors.

Life becomes even trickier if you want to create a workflow that sends data

through several different people. For example, if an expense report needs to be

created by an employee, verified by a team leader, and authorized by a supervisor,

you’ll need to convert the document to XML and then back to its original Office

format several times. The current generation of Office applications just isn’t

designed with this type of scenario in mind. Every time you convert Office data to

XML, you lose important formatting details, versioning information, macro code,

and other Office-specific features. The result is that XML, which is widely touted as

a universal language, is used mostly by application programmers—not by knowledge

workers and business professionals.

Office 2003 promises to change all this, and bring XML to a whole new audience:

Word and Excel power users. These users can now harness the benefits of

XML without needing to write conversion macros or full-fledged applications. Of

course, you’ll still need to understand the fundamentals of XML, and how they are

implemented in Office, which is where this book fits into the picture. In this book,