WordML And OLE Documents

Although there are lots and lots to like about WordML, my one big problem with it is when it comes to Object Linking and Embedding Documents (aka Ole Documents, or formerly compound documents).  Since in Office 2K3 beta 2 both Word and Excel can be saved as pure XML, I assumed (and you know what happens when you do that) that if you embedded an Excel Spreadsheet within a Word Document, and then tried to save it as XML you would get a multi-namespace document that had the Excel XML embedded within the WordML.  Well I finally got around to testing it out, and to my dismay, the Excel document is not XML but a binary stream within the WordML document.  It is embedded within a docOleData element, which is where I would have expected the XML to go.  Hopefully this will be fixed by the RTM release, but I don’t hold out hope.  The reason, when I try to do the opposite, a Word Document within Excel, and save it as XML, you get a warning that  Excel “Cannot export XML data. The XML maps in this workbook are not exportable.”.

I’ve been preaching the benefits of multi-namespaced documents for a long time, and I thought I was going to finally see some dramatic advances in this area (the W3C multi-namespace effort seems to have stalled).

DonXML

[Listening to: Everything's Cool - Lit ]