If Microsoft eventually takes over the world -- after a bloody urban war with Starbucks that leaves the Northwest a radioactive wasteland for hundreds of generations -- it will undoubtedly have much to do with Windows. But next to Windows, Microsoft"s biggest market muscle has got to be Office.

Heck, ask most frontline IT administrators what they least like to mess with, and the answer is usually Office rather than Windows. OS changes we can make in the background. Do it right and users don"t even notice, ergo no phone calls. Mess with Office, where users live, work, and schedule their racquetball games, and even if you do it right, you"ll get doused with a phone shower, because users hate change.

That"s why some folks have been gnawing at Microsoft"s rationale for announcing a new default file format for Office 12. After talking to Microsoft about what the new format will mean, however, I think Redmond can safely change Office 12"s code-name from "Yet Another Office What the Hell Are We Going to Change This Time?" to "Hey, This May Actually Be Worth Something."

I managed to get a few minutes on the phone with Jean Paoli, senior XML architect in the rainy Northwest. InfoWorld gave Paoli an Innovator award in 2003 for being a really smart guy, and his description of the new file format bears that out.

Paoli describes the new format in several steps. First, it defaults to an XML schema already available in Office 2003. It"s just a lot smarter about it. The new file format will save pieces of every document in several files and then stick the whole package into a single Zip-compressed package file. Paoli"s example was a PowerPoint file in which the file"s descriptive metadata is saved in one document, whereas the images and accompanying text get saved in other files. Office 12 will organize all these files and drop them into a Zip package.

The Zip not only means it"s organized; it also means the file is 50 percent to 75 percent smaller, thanks to the Zip compression and XML"s text roots. We should even see a bonus for the security-conscious: Office will organize every file the same way, which means security scanning applications will easily scan Office documents before they do something bad such as execute malware or send someone"s credit card information instead of his racquetball time. The same goes for data recovery, Paoli says, because of the large number of data recovery applications already targeting the Zip format.

And all this is above and beyond the real meat of XML, which is back-end systems integration. For us nonprogramming network guys, XML simply means smart. Documents that access databases, make dynamic changes to content, combine multiple formats and data sources -- that kind of smart. Sure, that means added complexity for new users who want to access these features. That"s unavoidable. The important thing is that Microsoft isn"t trying to force it.

Office 12 will continue to support the old Office file formats, which is my only concern. Don"t force users to access new features that, for many of them, add nothing new to their day. For once, though, Redmond isn"t doing that. If one of my clients buys the new Office, but another five don"t, they can still send documents to each other. At first, Office 12 users will simply need to save documents from outside sources back into the 2003 format. Eventually -- and to hear Paoli tell it, "eventually" means "pretty soon" -- Microsoft will write extensions for Office 2000 and later, allowing all of them to read, write to, and save the new format.

Paoli also says Microsoft will write bulk converters. That"s handy for that meeting where Mr. Bigwig Shinysuit sits up and asks why none of his older documents interface with back-end applications as the new documents can. Faced with this problem, a bulk converter will take entire volumes of older Office document data and convert them to the new format. After you test the hell out of it, of course.

Speaking of testing, we don"t have to worry too much about that right now. Paoli says the initial beta will ship this fall, but because these are seldom more than conversation pieces, you can bet 2005 won"t be the year of Office 12. Instead, look for Beta 2 to ship in spring 2006; that"s the version we need to test against. Then look for a shipping version in the second half of 2006.

I don"t like talking suits into an Office upgrade any more than the rest of you. And although Office 12 may have problems (we still haven"t talked about things such as pricing), the new file format won"t be one of them. If anything, this is one of the most compelling new features I"ve heard described by those Redmond boys in a long time.