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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.
... 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...
...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.)
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