XML in Office 11

A lot has been made of InfoPath and its impact on XML development. But the other Office 11 apps have great XML support as well. InfoPath might be great as a web service front end, but it would be a poor choice for a long XML document. For example, Martin Fowler wrote his latest book using XML, providing him a way to use the same XML source to generate web pages and printed pages. Martin uses XEmacs, but he could use Word 11. Word docs can have XML schemas associated with them. When you save these docs as XML, the custom schema information is embedded in the Word XML format (called WordML). Alternatively, you can choose to “save data only” which eliminates all the WordML leaving just the pure XML in the custom schema. You can even apply an XSL Transform during the saving process. Looks like Excel 11 has similar features. And there’s an app named MSOXMLED.exe installed into the Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft\Shared\OFFICE11 directory. According to the version info, its description is “XML Editor”. However, it doesn’t seem to launch, at least in my configuration (Office 11 beta running on Windows Server 2003 RC2 inside a Virtual PC).