The next version of Microsoft Office will be ‘dramatically better’ as a platform for creating applications, according to Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect.

Office 2007, due for release towards the end of the year, will feature a much greater level of programmability, including server-side processing of Office documents and other business information. While the Office applications have been scriptable for many years, and available for use in custom-written applications in recent versions, Office 2007 will allow developers to work directly with XML-based files. The availability of server-side processing components for Office documents will allow documents to be changed as part of a custom-written application.

The new ribbon-based user interface in Office 2007 also represents another opportunity for developers to extend Office applications by adding their own components to the ribbon. Gates explained that the new interface makes extensions easier for users to find: “It’s a results-oriented interface. Things were hidden beneath those menus, and people didn’t know how to find features in that two-dimensional structure. We think it’s great for end users, but it also creates a framework for applications that we’ve never had before.”