The newspaper's own calculation puts the average at $26,327. This confirms a Rule of Life that I learned in college: Don't rely on English majors to split the bar tab.

I mention this article because it described how one bride-to-be maintained her invitation list in Excel. She color-coded the list by who submitted the name--groom, bride, groom's parents, or bride's parents. The colors told her whom to ask if there were questions about someone's info.

A bridesmaid volunteered to address invitations. "Since the invite list was in handy Excel, it was easy to hand this project over," the bride said.

"The Excel list also came in handy when people have asked about who to invite to showers and bachelor or bachelorette parties," she said. "I'm sure I'll love it for thank-you notes later, too."

Excel...a key addition to every bride's trousseau.

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Office 12 to Use XML File Formats

Evidence continues to grow that Office 12 will be the most significant upgrade that Microsoft has offered in a long time.

Microsoft recently announced that XML will be the default Office 12 file format for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. This will replace current XLS, DOC, and PPT binary formats, respectively.

Microsoft says that using XML will offer many benefits:

• Because Microsoft will publish the file formats, you'll be able to read Office documents, and write them from scratch, using non-Microsoft software. Expect many, many programs to offer the option to save (or "print") data to an Excel or Word file.
   
• You'll be able to search the contents of documents more easily.
   
• Because Office 12 will use ZIP and other compression technologies to save Office documents, the files will be 50 to 75 percent smaller than they are now. When you save and open files, they'll be zipped and unzipped automatically.
   
• You'll be able to recover damaged files more easily. One reason for this is that Office files will be very modular. If one module breaks the others should be unaffected.
   
• You'll be able to modify Office files in a batch. For example, you'll be able to replace an old corporate logo with a new one, in many workbooks, in one operation.
   
• Viruses should be reduced. Files that aren't enabled to run code will ignore embedded code. Files with embedded code will be easy to identify.
   
• You'll be able to change many aspects of your workbooks without opening them. For example, you'll be able to change fonts, headers and footers, bitmaps, and so on.
   
• Today, Excel offers document properties like Author, Title, Subject, and so on. In Excel 12, you'll also be able to add and update your own document properties.

File extensions will change significantly in Office 12. Here are the extensions that Microsoft has announced:

Notice that workbooks using an XML format have a different extension than binary workbooks. Also, macro-enabled workbooks will have a different extension than those that are macro-free.

Microsoft has announced that future updates to Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 will support the new file format. The company will offer software that will convert batches of old XLS, DOC, and PPT files to the new format.

More later,