No, I think this was introduced in Excel 2003.
What I did when receiving some files in this format was to rename the
extension to .hml and then open within Internet Explorer by double-
clicking. From there I could use File | Save As to save the file
as .TXT, which I could then put into Notepad to tidy it up further.
Saving the file as .txt again enabled me to import it into Excel in
the format I required. Is .XML meant to be an improvement?
Hope this helps.
Pete