Mac Office 12 to Get XML Formats, Too

Rick Shaut, a member of the Macintosh Office team, wrote in his Web log that the Macintosh version of Office 12 will also support the Office Open XML format announced Thursday for its Windows counterpart. He called the new features an "enormous undertaking" by Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, and admitted they had fallen behind on XML support within the Office Suite.

Also, for the first time in the history of Microsoft, both Windows and Mac units will be implementing major architectural changes to the software simultaneously.

"This means that Mac Office 12 will ship some time after Win Office 12, however I'm not at liberty to discuss projected ship dates or the currently planned delta between Win Office 12 and Mac Office 12," Shaut wrote.

In order to implement the new Open XML features, the Mac BU will take "snapshots" of the code written by the Windows side and then port it to Mac OS X. With the exception of "a few minor details and bug fixes" the code between the two would be nearly identical.

"The challenge is interesting enough that I might even end up writing a white paper on the topic. We'll see," Shaut said.

Converters will be made available for users of Office X and Office 2004 to migrate their documents to the new XML-based formats. Shaut says that while details are still fluid, it would allow for two-way translation between the old and new formats.

Shaut said that at this point Word 12 on Mac can "speak XML" as well as Word 2003 on Windows, but he could not say if the same was true for PowerPoint or Excel.