Office 2003 XML (Integrating Office with the Rest of the World)

In Microsoft's Office 2003, users experience the merger of the power of the classic Office suite of applications with the fluidity of data exchange inherent in XML. With XML at its heart, the new version of Microsoft's desktop suite liberates the information stored in millions of documents created with Office software over the past fifteen years, making it available to a wide variety of programs.

Office 2003 XML offers an in-depth exploration of the relationship between XML and Office 2003, examining how the various products in the Office suite both produce and consume XML. Developers will learn how they can connect Microsoft Office to others systems, while power users will learn to create and analyze XML documents using familiar Office tools.

The book begins with an overview of the XML features included in the various Office 2003 components, and explores in detail how Word, Excel, and Access interact with XML. This book covers both the user interface side, creating interfaces so that users can comfortably (and even unknowingly) work with XML, and the back end, exposing Office information to other processes. It also looks at Microsoft's new InfoPath application and how it fits with the rest of Office. Finally, the book's appendices introduce various XML technologies that may be useful in working with Office, including XSLT, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, and SOAP. Office 2003 XML provides quick and clear guidance to a anyone who needs to import or export information from Office documents into other systems. Both XML programmers and Office power will learn how to get the most from this powerful new intersection between Office 2003 and XML.