Well, Office 2000 has been delivered, XML's a much bigger splash than it was in late 1998, and you might be wondering what new levels of integration you can bring to your intranet sites. In this article I'll explain what Microsoft has actually delivered with Office 2000, and how you can go about marrying its power to that of Domino. Don't be alarmed by all the "X-onyms" -- the article doesn't presume too much acquaintance with XML or the hundreds of new acronyms arising around it.

Web documents in 2000
The major new feature of Office 2000 is that almost all of its functions can be supported in HTML documents, whereas previously a proprietary binary format was used. This might seem a minor change, but the potential for Office intranet use is enormous. While it's true that Office 97 could read and write HTML (with the help of an add-on or two), the resulting Web files lost a great deal of the rich content of an Office document, producing plain HTML sufficient for browser display but insufficient for re-using the document in Office.

For example, if you saved an Excel 97 sheet in HTML format, all the formulae would be lost, as would macros, templates, advanced cell formatting options, and anything else other than a basic HTML table, with the same text, numbers, and some basic coloring and layout that a good Web browser could understand. If another Excel user were to open the HTML file, she'd load only the text, numbers, and layout that the browser could read. Lacking formulae, the sheet would no longer automatically recalculate macros and much of the cell formatting would be lost. The situation in Word and PowerPoint would be similar. PowerPoint slides, for example, would come back in as single large image files, rather than separate graphics and text bullets, so text couldn't be edited and would have to be airbrushed out and retyped.