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This may prove worrisome.

MS Office 2003 has XML support built-in but in particular XL 2003 the ability to also generate an XL S/S sheet by interrogating a published Web Services wsdl interface doc & interacting with the service it defines as if it is a transaction client (saw a demo of this at MS in Asia last year, very impressive - at this demo the S/S was made to look like an established govt driver's licence application, this S/S-doc could be downloaded from the govt web site, the user fills in the form clicks submit & the data gets sent directly to a govt server & processed & sends the user their new licence details to print off as well as interactively having cherged their credit card).

The significance of that demo was that a 'business-to-business, secure & stateful transaction, was constructed from an XL S/S by a business analyst who didn't program a single line of code. He just pointed XL at the published *.wsdl for the drivers licence web service, requested XL generate the required client code in response to the *.wsdl data defining the Web Service interface, then arranged the appearance of the S/S to look just like the form in use for a licence, tested it with the Web Service, then placed it on the govt web site for users to download & fill in & execute.

So if MS starts copyrighting their XL schema, they are attempting to block anyone else being able to emulate their XL web services capability.

Doug M