Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) that will improve your working life

  • Article

This is big news.  Apart from doing Microsoft Employee staffing jobs at TechEd this year, I thought that for me TechEd this year was going to be SQL SQL SQL.  With SQL 2005 (formerly known as “Yukon”) coming out later this year, for me and IT Pros like me, it means learning about how to install, upgrade, support, and administer that new product. 

But today another TLA is taking center-stage, and I’m sure there will be a lot of excitement now at TechEd about this, too: XML .  And here’s the big news: The team working on the new version of Office (Office 12, which will come out sometime next year) announced that there are new file formats for some old familiar Office docs types.. ALL XML!

If Austin Powers were coming to TechEd, he’d say “XML baby! YEAAAH!”

An article on Channel9, as well as a video interview and demo, describe it all.
https://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=73329

Nineguy

Here are some of the major tidbits from the article:

  • Word, Excel, and Powerpoint will get a new file format all based on XML.
  • The extensions will change from .DOC, .XLS, .PPT to .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX.
  • The new file format is actually enclosed in a ZIP file. Change the extension name to .ZIP and you'll be able to double-click and get access to all the pieces of the new format.
  • The new file format will be usable on existing versions of Office.

Groovy baby!

Whaddya think?