As organizations continue to move their business solutions to the Web, they have a greater need to make their Office applications part of their overall Web solution. Office XP provides a variety of tools that allow organizations to create and extend their solutions to the Web. Users can load and save generic, well-formed, and spreadsheet XML directly into Excel. Furthermore users can query XML spreadsheets from the Web and thereby analyze important Web data. Access users can easily import or export XML schema and data documents into and out of Access.
Users can automatically import the XML tables or access advanced options to customize the import.
Similarly, when users export XML data, schema, and presentations, they can leave the defaults as they are, or they can select advanced options for greater control over the exported output. In addition to the Smart Tags that will ship as part of Word and Excel, third parties can tie in to the Smart Tag technology to offer their own solutions for Office XP users. For example, an organization can create a Smart Tag that links the user directly to all the organization s customers, orders, prices, and more, when the user simply types in an order number into Excel. Smart Tags can be customized via the Smart Tag SDK which will be available on Microsoft s Web site and as part of the Microsoft Office XP Developer edition. The Excel PivotTable component offers conditional filtering on a range of expressions for filtering data.