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 for XML-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 2003 will make it easier to collaborate with co-workers and utilize the information resources of your enterprise and the Web. | 
