Peeking into Office 12

Office 12 will continue to support the old Office file formats, which is my only concern. Don't force users to access new features that, for many of them, add nothing new to their day. For once, though, Redmond isn't doing that. If one of my clients buys the new Office, but another five don't, they can still send documents to each other. At first, Office 12 users will simply need to save documents from outside sources back into the 2003 format. Eventually -- and to hear Paoli tell it, "eventually" means "pretty soon" -- Microsoft will write extensions for Office 2000 and later, allowing all of them to read, write to, and save the new format.

Paoli also says Microsoft will write bulk converters. That's handy for that meeting where Mr. Bigwig Shinysuit sits up and asks why none of his older documents interface with back-end applications as the new documents can. Faced with this problem, a bulk converter will take entire volumes of older Office document data and convert them to the new format. After you test the hell out of it, of course.

Speaking of testing, we don't have to worry too much about that right now. Paoli says the initial beta will ship this fall, but because these are seldom more than conversation pieces, you can bet 2005 won't be the year of Office 12. Instead, look for Beta 2 to ship in spring 2006; that's the version we need to test against. Then look for a shipping version in the second half of 2006.

I don't like talking suits into an Office upgrade any more than the rest of you. And although Office 12 may have problems (we still haven't talked about things such as pricing), the new file format won't be one of them. If anything, this is one of the most compelling new features I've heard described by those Redmond boys in a long time.