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Form Filling Through Office 12
Qa32 writes "For those chomping at the bit for more Office 12 details, Microsoft offered a tiny peek at the upcoming offering, or offerings, due next year. In what he termed the first public viewing of Office 12, Chris Caposella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, showed off a distributed forms capability that would enable customers to fill in and submit XML forms easily via a browser, without having to run Microsoft InfoPath on their PC."
Like you can do with PDFs today (and for the past couple of years)?
Does this mean the MS Office 12 implements the XForms standard, or that it embraces and extends it in a proprietary way? If so, what's the advantage for users of MS Office 12 over XForms?
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Microsoft is using an open and robust format (XML) for their office documents - what's wrong with that? Now projects like OpenOffice have an easier time importing and exporting documents. The entire key is portability. (text also compresses better than .doc files)
I don't use it often, since my job requires more design based software (read: Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver, etc..) However every year my work spends quite a lot of money making sure I have the newest version, yet I don't really know what changes.
We primarily use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and with small exceptions of where commands are located and the icons "bubbly-ness", I haven't noticed much of a difference between the 95, 2k, XP, and 2k3 versions. In fact the only difference that really pops out at me is what programs are considered as part of "Office Pro".
It used to be that 95 and 2k came with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Access. Then XP came out with those plus Publisher (which IIRC was someone elses product that was purchased by MS) Then 2k3 came out and is the same but with Visio (which I know was someone elses product but bought by MS).
So does each version just add a new software to the bundle or are there really changes? (changes being more than buubly icons and moving the location of th email-merge command)
Ave Molech Setting
... this capability. Yes, PDF forms have allowed this for quite some time. But, like it or lump it, MS is the leader when it comes to productivity apps. This ability expands the Office line further into the general web and closer to the world of open standards. Seems to me like one of the few useful features they have introduced in a long time. Besides, it's not like they have a choice. OpenOffice 2.0 (beta 1.9) is looking sweet and is finally starting to represent an actual threat to the Evil Empire.
Bang Logic - Serious Small Business Services
MS Office -- stick a fork in it -- it's done.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
I have no idea what this means, and I suspect you don't, either.
Didn't I just admit that? I was only regurgiating the marketing materials. Here, you try:
InfoPath (previously code-named "XDocs"), is a new product in the Microsoft Office family. Using InfoPath helps to streamline the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms.
The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because InfoPath supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, InfoPath helps to connect you directly to organizational information and gives you the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact and productivity.
Say what? The words above are flowing, but the ideas are not.
I'm supposed to be a "troll" for asking if you actually had any clue
Mods, will you please fix that? It's very annoying when we're trying to have a discussion and you go around modding people into oblivion.
So, since a) you know what InfoPath is, b) neither the article or Microsoft are very helpful at defining it, how about sharing a useful definition of *what* it is?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...when Microsoft stops talking about what they are going to reinvent next year, and releases something new .
Yawn. Never saw a more boring company.
They do it, quite simply, because Office does pretty much what it always has. Sure, maybe Excel gets a new graph format or a new function, and maybe Word tells you how many paragraphs per fortnight you write.
None of these are sexy marketing bullets. "New in Office 2006! Sin() 125% faster! Slightly different 3D chart you'll never use! Spell check finally has 80% instead of 75% of English words!" doesn't cut it on the banners and magazine ads.
"Office 2006- streamlined for the way YOU and YOUR business works. So you can get to the important things in life quicker" (insert picture of model playing with model child, both of them laughing. Flowers and ice cream and little puppies optional).
Sound familiar? That's because that is the basis for virtually every "new" Office release marketing blitz in the last decade. Why? Because for much of the business world, if you're sitting there at your desk instead of home with your SO and/or kids, chances are you're staring at a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document. Translation: you identify with the supposed problem and believe the utter lie- that the new software will boost your productivity.
Also, changing around the interface keeps the training companies busy, and pushes companies to upgrade everyone so "people don't get confused" (same with the myriad of niggling little incompatibilities, especially in Powerpoint, which affect how slides are rendered.)
Please help metamoderate.
Could somebody please summarize what in the hell an "XML Form" is? XML is, quite simply, a way of formatting flat data. Saying "XML Form" is like saying "Comma-delimited Form". What in the hell does this mean?
I don't respond to AC's.
When is Open Office 2 going to be released? I understand that it is still under production and a firm release date is difficult. But at least Mozilla, for example, gave us estimates for each new release of Firefox until 1.0 came out. All Open Office tells us is that it will come out. Not when.
TFA says "a browser." Doesn't specify which browser or platform.
I'll eat someone's tinfoil hat if this works plugin-free with any browser other than IE7 on Windows.
Will still eventually upgrade.. Can only put off the compatibility issue so long.
It creeps up on you slowly. First one vendor upgrades, then another, then you find you cant 'talk' to your customers, and voila.. you upgrade..
Happens to the best of us..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
less functional
I think that's a very pessimistic description. InfoPath is essentially a knockoff from XForms, which is essentially a DTD with hints on data input. That means that very complex XML docs with nested tree-like structures, etc, can be created as a direct result of an XForms (or InfoPath) engine. Trust me, INPUT tags have nothing on that.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/