Microsoft breathed new life into legacy office documents by opening an XML window (Office Open XML) to its office products through its royalty-free XPS specification. XPS stands for XML Paper Specification that specifies cross-platform, open standard, document representation that can be used for generating, sharing, printing and archiving of paginated documents. Its virtues in Microsoft’s own words are, "With XPS, documents print better, can be shared easier, be archived with confidence, and are more secure."

Microsoft Word 2007 with its fileName.docx format is a full fidelity (describing everything related to the document completely) XML file format, the default save format, which used to be binary format till Word 2003. The document as envisaged in Word 2007 consists of document parts (folder, file hierarchy) each of which describing a part of the document with a logical relationship (logical hierarchy) between the constituent parts. This makes it easy to touch and modify only those parts that need to be modified without modifying the others. In essence it is no more necessary to work with the whole document but surgically modify the needed part. In a manner similar to the *.docx extension for Word 2007, there are *.xlsx and *.pptx extensions for Excel 2007 and Power Point 2007, respectively. Although this tutorial deals with a Word 2003 document with the new format, similar considerations apply for MS Excel and MS Power Point files as well.

A document created in Word 2003 can be saved with the new extension. This article describes the details of such a document. The document used in this tutorial is a very simple document with very little content as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1