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The next version of Microsoft Office is, among other things, a family of XML editors. I have discussed the XML modes of Word and Excel (see and ), and described the newest member of this family, InfoPath 2003, a tool for gathering XML data (see ). Now that I’ve had a chance to work with InfoPath, its role and value are becoming clearer. [Full story at ] … []

Cool!!!  I’m getting pretty stoked about the new products in the Office family.  I’ve been drawn back to Office recently as a worthwhile development platform for small personal solutions like web publishing (not FrontPage, either–we’re talking Word-to-XML conversion), mail filtering, Outlook add-ons, Excel XML export, and more.

But as for the new stuff, XML is a major part of the strategy.  OneNote is a different kind of product and fills in the other gap that I see in the personal productivity suite for the power user.  Note taking made natural.

Maybe by summer of 2003, I will find that the combination of products in Office 2003 will make my Notebase idea somewhat unnecessary.

I’ll try to post some links to product info pages later.