Word 11

I’ve seen a really impressive demo of Word 11.

The first part showed how to write a document bound to a XML-Schema and post it to a Web Service. I already knew about this feature. I think it makes Word a killing app for content editing.  I was somehow involved in the development of websites where journalists write and post news. They wanted to write in Word and we wanted just the data, so we had to extract it somehow. Now it will just work. If you are involved in this kind of application, Word 11 is a must-have. I want to write my weblog from Word, so when Scott adds a Web Service to post the news, I’ll try it, even if Don’s InfoPath solution seems better for this particular case.

When I thought the demo was over, they invoked a Web Service that returned some stock quote information, and that information was added to the Word document. The section where the data was added was somehow ‘linked’ to the Web Service. You could change the view of that data, so instead of showing the last quote, it showed the volume, etc, and change the view again, and you had the 1-year chart. Also, if you changed the stock symbol _in the document_ the data was refreshed! It is like they are monitoring when you change something in the document and calling the Web Service. This was really cool.