Office 12 will have XPS, a rival to PDF

An XML Paper Specification, XPS, codenamed “Metro”, is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s PDF, an electronic document format that can be printed without needing the application that created it. Windows Vista will incorporate a reader for the format.

Office 12 applications, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Visio, OneNote, and InfoPath, will include a “Save As XPS” option, said Jeff Bell, a program manager on the Office Development Team.

“This Office feature provides a one-way export from Office client applications to an application- and platform-independent, paginated format. To view, and print, an XPS document, users will need a viewer utility, which Microsoft itself will produce for Windows Vista and an unknown number of earlier editions of the Windows OS.”

Andy Simonds, the Group Program Manager for the Windows Digital Documents Team writes, “What I think will resonate the most with customers is the ability to roll-out Windows Rights Management Services and use the same infrastructure to rights-manage Office files as well as XPS files.”

And what of the recently announced native PDF facility in Office 12? “We think choice is a good thing,” said Bell.
[Via InformationWeek]

We’ll be looking at XPS in more detail on Monday.