Just after I finished reading all the hoop-la about OpenOffice's OpenDocument 1.0 file format being standardized, Microsoft followed up with a great Channel9 video about the new file formats coming in the next version of Microsoft Office.

I have to say I'm excited about the possibilities both new XML-based file formats open up. For example, it should be easy to generate documents, spreadsheets, or presentations on the fly from a web application or an automated process. It will be interesting to see a whole slew of third party tools and scripts spring up for automating document parsing, generation, and modification. It should also be much easier to convert between the two formats, although this is obviously much more of a benefit for underdog OpenOffice.

The Microsoft Office 12 file format is particular interesting because it's actually a zip file with the various parts of the document (text, formatting, embedded images, comments, macros, etc.) all saved as separate files within the zip. This should make it pretty simple to programmatically change images and apply different formatting to document files. Now if only Outlook would use an open/accessible database format...