Chapter 29: Working with XML

---

Overview

If you're not sure why people are so excited about XML, you're not alone. XML (which stands for Extensible Markup Language) has been around since 1998, but for the most part, it has been used only by people who are comfortable with technologies and programming languages for the World Wide Web. Now Word 2003 and the other core Office applications make XML an option for the rest of us.

The beauty of XML is its flexibility—you can create a document, save it as XML, and store it in such a way that it can be used across platforms, across countries, and across just about any data barrier you can imagine. Do you have gigabytes of data locked away in your old system that are inaccessible by today's software? Are there reports, legal briefings, analyses, and other documents spread over desktop PCs all over your organization that might offer valuable data if you could pull all the information together and actually put it in a usable form? Are you tired of writing the same type of information—marketing reports, statistical analyses, brochures, Web pages, and more—over and over again, when you could be using information already available in other files?

XML can change all that. In this chapter, you'll learn about the XML features in Word 2003 and find out how to create and save your own XML documents.

Note 

XML support is available only in the stand-alone version of Word 2003 and in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.

---