XML in Office 2003 : Information Sharing with Desktop XML

-Written by Goldfarb, the inventor of markup language technology, and Walmsley, a leading expert on XML Schema, on which Office 2003's XML features are based.-Ideal for both Office power users and IT developers.-Foreword and cover endorsement by Jean Paoli, Microsoft's Chief XML Architect.

What do you give the software that has everything? XML, of course! Microsoft Office is the most successful productivity product in the history of computers, with over 300 million users around the world. Few of them use all of the features in Office now, so why add something new? It wasn't just the needs of the information worker that motivated this extraordinary enhancement to Office, it was the needs of the information itself. Thanks to the Internet, local networks, business integration and the very ubiquity of Office, key enterprise data is not available in one convenient place. Some of it is in managed central stores, but much more is in desktop systems, departmental repositories, and even in the systems of vendors and customers. Past versions of Office have provided tools for coping with this problem, but solution implementation has been cumbersome and often required advanced development skills. That was in part because every data source typically has its own data format. In addition to accessing the information, a solution often had to decode it as well. In the past few years, XML has emerged to solve that problem; it has become the universal information interchange representation. XML software for machine-to-machine functions is virtually standard equipment for all platforms. But until September, 2003, the only generally useful XML on the desktop was strictly in specialized products. Common productivity tools like office suites supported only specific XML document types, when they supported XML at all. Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 changed that situation forever, by accepting any user-defined XML document as a first-class citizen. As a result, millions of desktop computers have been transformed from mere word processors into potential rich clients for Web services, editing front-ends for XML content management systems, and portals forXML-based application integration. This book shows you how to use the XML features of Office to realize that potential. You'll learn to share information among Office products and between Office and the rest of the XML universe. XML in Office 2003will make it easier to collaborate with co-workers and utilize the information resources of your enterprise and the Web. Who is this book for? You don't have to be a professional developer to use the Office XML features. We've written this book so that office users who are comfortable with preference settings and macros will be able to tap into these resources. If you can deal with scripts or are willing to copy and modify ours you'll be able to do even more. And if you are a pro, you'll find that we don't talk down to you: you'll easily see the added possibilities for real program code. And XML knowledge isn't a prerequisite for this book either. It includes a bonus section of tutorials on XML and its related technologies, adapted from the best-sellingXML Handbook. How much XML? Chapter 2 of this book is an introduction to XML that should be sufficient for learning the XML features of Office 2003. However, if you plan to use XML products other than Office, develop your own schemas, or use Office to share data with enterprise systems and Web services, you'll want to learn more about XML. As our readers will have differing experience with XML and different requirements for its use, there seemed no sensible way to intersperse detailed XML education with the Office XML tasks that are the focus of the book. Instead we've put the detailed tutorials and references on the XML language and related standards where you can easily find them when you need them. They are in Part Three. The book's Table of Contents and Index can guide you to specific subjects, and we also provide appropr