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How often did you get annoyed at the fact that you weren't able to access some kind of
information because it was stored in a proprietary, non-documented format? You certainly
wondered more than once if the existence of all these different formats makes sense.
People all over the world use Microsoft Powerpoint slide shows to present fruits of their work. This results in a huge amount of valuable knowledge stored in a poorly documented, complex proprietary file format. From a data management point of view, this format is a dead end.
With the advent of the eXtensible Markup Language, commonly known as XML, a solution to all format problems appeared on the horizon. With XML, data can be stored as a tree-like structure in text-based files which are both machine- and human-readable.
Most big players of the software industry adopted XML technology in their products. Although it surely isn't a cure for all problems and it even entails new ones, XML and its family of open standards can be leveraged to gain a high degree of interoperability.
Parts of the latest Microsoft Office suite are able to import and export XML. However, Microsoft PowerPoint still lacks direct XML support. Microsoft has announced that the next Office suite will natively support XML. Microsoft Office 12 will appear by the end of the year 2006.
If you do not want to depend on Microsoft's promises and if you want a working, cost-effective solution right now, take a look at the PowerML product suite.
The PowerML product suite offers platform-independent, Java-based solutions for managing PowerPoint presentations. At the moment, the suite consists of two products: