Microsoft Office Excel 2003 offers two rather different kinds of XML functionality. Excel (in the Professional and Enterprise editions) allows users to build spreadsheets that load data from XML files, making it easy to analyze information sent from various sources using the same spreadsheet. The data that a spreadsheet analyzes can be separated from the logic used to analyze it very easily this way, making it simpler to create spreadsheets that work more like ordinary applications. Excel 2003 (and XP) also offer the ability to save and open spreadsheets which are themselves saved in Excel's own XML format; these features will be explored in Chapter 7.
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