In recent years, there has been considerable activity and progress in open standards to enable access to the content of office documents. More and more office documents are now being stored in accessible XML formats.
This paper is aimed at managers who need to access information held in office documents, perhaps as part of a document management system, as part of a business process, or to exchange data between different office applications. With these new open standards for document formats, there are exciting opportunities for better integration in this area. Users need to be aware about what is available and what will be in the future, and the implications of these changes.