XML Products

XML-based formats have become the default for most office-productivity tools. Here is a quick list of these tools and their respective descriptions.

Microsoft Office Open XML
Following the advent of XML in the 1990s, corporate computing customers began to realize the business value in adopting open formats and standardization in the computer products and applications that they relied on. IT professionals benefited from the common data format possible with XML because of its capacity to be read by applications, platforms, and Internet browsers.
Likewise, with the adoption of support for XML in Microsoft Office 2000, developers began to see the need to transition from the binary file formats seen in previous versions of Microsoft Office to the XML format. Binary files (.doc, .dot, .xls, and .ppt files), which for years did a great job of storing and transporting data, were not able to meet the new workplace challenges that included easily moving data between disparate applications, and allowing users to glean business insight from that data.
The 2007 Microsoft Office system continues with this transition by adopting an XML-based file format for Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Word 2007, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. The new file format, called Office Open XML Formats, addresses these workplace issues with changes that affect the way that you approach solutions based on Microsoft Office documents.

The OpenOffice.org XML Project
OpenOffice is a free, Open Source alternative to MS Office with a Word compatible word processor, a complete Excel compatible spread sheet program and a Power Point like presentation software and drawing program and also allows to save to PDF file. more>> OpenOffice.org is the open source project through which Sun Microsystems is releasing the technology for the popular StarOffice productivity suite. It is an international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. It establishes the necessary facilities to make this open source technology available to the developer community. It can be downloaded for free at THIS SITE.

BroadVision's QuickSilver
BroadVision QuickSilver 3.0 enables you to create lengthy, complex documents in virtually any language through the use of Unicode authoring; publish those documents to multiple output formats (including XML, HTML, PDF and Postscript) and automatically deliver them as personalized content to BroadVision Portal. Author in valid XML and non-XML format in the same application. Assemble publications from a variety of text, graphic and database sources, including Microsoft Word, AutoCad, Microsoft Excel, and Oracle. And, deliver them simultaneously online and to print.
QuickSilver 3.0 supports all Eastern and Western European languages and Asian languages such as Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese and Korean. It has reusable content and cascading changes, attribute tagging and conditional views. It also has mulitple TOCs and indices; multi-level and master.

Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office
Open XML is an open ECMA 376 standard and is also approved as the ISO/IEC 29500 standard that defines a set of XML schemas for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations, and word processing documents. Microsoft Office Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 all use Open XML as the default file format. The Open XML file formats are useful for developers because they use an open standard and are based on well-known technologies: ZIP and XML. The Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office is built on top of the System.IO.Packaging API and provides strongly typed part classes to manipulate Open XML documents. The SDK also uses the .NET Framework Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) technology to provide strongly typed object access to the XML content inside the parts of Open XML documents. The Open XML SDK 2.0 simplifies the task of manipulating Open XML packages and the underlying Open XML schema elements within a package. The Open XML Application Programming Interface (API) encapsulates many common tasks that developers perform on Open XML packages, so you can perform complex operations with just a few lines of code.

The xmldeveloper project was conceptualized by Professor Tona Henderson and developed by Scott Root at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a Master's capstone project. The aim of this toolbar is to help XML developers with their programming efforts by supplying a central toolbar for everything XML. This will be an ongoing project that will only get as good as the contributors let it.