In Brief

• The Office Suite has been renamed Office System 2003. The new release includes new products, such as InfoPath and OneNote, and also enhances existing products with XML support, particularly Word, Excel, and Access.

• InfoPath is focused as a general-purpose electronic forms design, creation, and submission tool. It uses XML as the representation format for electronic forms data and has intrinsic support for relational databases and Web services.

• With Electronic Forms, InfoPath can be utilized as a Smart Client for front-end Web services.

• XML support primarily exists in Word, Excel, and Access. XML support provides the capability for Office documents to be exported as XML or support for specific pieces of the document to be data bound to XML Schema elements for a better separation of structured content and its presentation.

• Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) provides .NET programmability support for Office applications, particularly Excel and Word. It provides a set of project templates for Visual 2003 so that applications that have been previously developed using VBA can now be developed and securely deployed using managed code. VSTO internally uses COM interoperability support for accessing Office APIs using a set of Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) that are included with the Office 2003 Installation program.

• XML Web services can be used to customize Office 2003 helper applications, such as the Research pane and Smart Tags. The chapter previewed how a Customer Research pane could be developed to make available customer- related information to Office users without any programming.