“We couldn’t have done this without XML,” says Bill Gates in this morning’s PDC2005 keynote.

Thank goodness the Vista stuff wasn’t blocked for us lowly livecast viewers, we were allowed to see that the Vista version of IE has more intelligent RSS support, including auto detection of all RSS feeds on the page. We were shown lots of Vista.

Also shown/shared was the new UI for Office 12 for Excel. Enhanced tooltips. Improved table tools. Visualize cells using something new called a databar. A bunch of data analysis filtering options, all of which look very cool and easy to get/extract information about the data. Something new called galleries, which allow live previews.

Word new UI doesn’t seem to have changed much (at least from the grainy video shots), but seems to add some worthwhile features particularly in the area of page numbering, headers and footers.

Powerpoint Office 12 is adding live previews and working to provide “better results, faster.” This seems to be the focus for the Office 12 package.

Office 12 Outlook. Preview attachments inside the window without launching another application (wondering about the security issues on this one?). RSS feeds inside Outlook 12, nice! This has been available via third party programs for awhile, so not too surprising that this feature is coming. Quick search across all of Outlook; let’s hope this one is fast. Outlook 12 offers better integration with Sharepoint.

Gates back on stage: “In late 2006 when these products come out … ” So still they’re stuck on the late 2006 timeline for Vista. One shock and awe announcement, that likely won’t be forthcoming, would be that they were releasing Vista in the first half of 2006. Gates goes on to say that there will be a large marketing push behind Vista. “The vision here is about connecting people to information they care about,” said Gates. XML web services will be centralized component.

XML … the future? At least Microsoft seems to think so.

tags: pdc05

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