The XML FAQ

Yes, most office productivity suites already do this, and there are more on the way:

• OpenOffice has been saving its files as XML by default for a several years. The package comprise a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation software, and a vector drawing package, and they share the same DTD/Schema. The Office Document Format (ODF) is now the official International Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) for office documents.

• Corel's WordPerfect suite has shipped with a fully-fledged XML editor for many years (which also does full SGML as well). It can save the formatted output as a Microsoft Word .doc file, but it uses its own stylesheet technology to format documents, not XSLT or CSS. It can also save its own (WordPerfect) document format to an XML representation.

• The AbiWord wordprocessor (all platforms) can open Word and OpenOffice documents and save them in DocBook XML format, although it does not provide native XML editing.

• Microsoft Office 2003 provides a ‘Save As…XML’ to all parts of the suite except Powerpoint, using WordML to represent the visual appearance of the document, although it will preserve style names if they are in use.

  Word 2007 saves natively as XML, using Office Open XML (similar to WordML but not identical) which is Microsoft's equivalent to unknownODF, which they are attempting to have recognised as a parallel international standard.

  Word contains a real XML editor as well, supporting other W3C Schemas as well as its own (but not DTDs), and this also provides a method for binding element types to Word's named styles (like Microsoft's earlier product SGML Author for Word did).

• Avoid Microsoft's ‘Works’ package, as it is incompatible both with Office and with XML.

• I have no information on Lotus office products.

There is more detail under ‘XML File Formats for Office Documents’ in the XML Cover Pages which briefly describes and points to further information on: GNOME Office, KOffice, Microsoft XDocs, OASIS TC for Open Office XML File Format, 1DOK.org Project, and OpenOffice.org XML File Format.