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As well as introducing an XML format for PowerPoint, Microsoft is promising 'significantly enhanced XML formats' for Word and Excel. It will, Redmond claims, help improve file and data management, data recovery, and interoperability with external business systems. Users of will also be able to extract or repurpose the underlying data for their own ends.

The announcement has been made a few days ahead of the development-oriented Tech Ed 2005 conference. It will be held in Orlando, Florida next week, when Microsoft will reveal more details about the new application-specific XML formats.

XML (extensible markup language) is the standard that underpins the growing use of Web services and data interchange, and this announcement marks another advance for its widespread adoption within computing. With its separation of the 'logic' of data from the details of its physical presentation, XML is increasingly the underlying lingua franca for business on the Web.

We have been here before, of course. With each successive stage of integrating XML support into Office - for the 2000 and then 2003 versions - we were promised degrees of 'native XML' support. At first this was the ability to explicitly export the familiar .doc and .xls formats to XML, and then with further integration, XML becomes available as one of the many secondary formats available the common 'Save As' function.

It seems that with Office 12 - due to be released in 2006 - XML will be the default option for the main documents supported within Office.

Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President for Office, attributed the development to Bill Gates' 'The New World of

'Building on XML support in Microsoft Office, customers can improve data flow throughout their organizations,' he added. 'They can build customized business process and productivity solutions that help information workers make a greater impact on their business.'

The macro advantages are also clear for Microsoft itself. The Office system has increasingly grown beyond simple stand alone spreadsheet and word processing apps - the vast software suite now supports a range of business processes. By handling data in XML form it will be easier for Microsoft to truly integrate the various processes and functionality that Office can provide - including spreadsheets in Web services, controlling access to text and recording and managing changes by different personnel, etc.

More specifically, the new format should result in smaller file sizes - up to 75 per cent smaller than comparable Office 2003 files, Microsoft states. Being text based, it is well suited for ZIP compression, which is particularly relevant given the amount of documents that flow over the Internet via email.

According to Sinofsky, there are also data recovery gains: 'In the new format, each type of data within a file is segmented and stored separately,' he explains. 'So, when one file component is corrupt, the remainder of the file will still open within the application. For example, if a chart were to become damaged, this would not prevent people from opening every other part of the document, without the charts. This is different than the binary formats used in older applications, where corruption of a particular piece of data would prevent the entire file from loading properly.'

But what of legacy data, all those .doc files? Microsoft is promising full backward compatibility with the versions of Microsoft Office that most people are already using: Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Similarly, the current .doc, .xls, and .ppt binary file formats will be fully compatible with 'Office 12' systems.