Exported XML Data Not Well-Formed

[Pamela Fong]

I'm having fun, mostly, with Office 2003. It's helping
me to increase my productivity. I'm very glad to see the
new XML features offered by Office 2003 Professional
applications, and would not be posting to this group, if
it wasn't such an important tool. But already, I have
run into a hurdle.

My Excel spreadsheet contains a text cell, having
contents,

"Pammy"

That is, the contents of the text cell contains quotation
marks. I created an XML map which links this cell to the
XML element named,

middlename

The problem is, that when I use,

Data|XML|Export...

to extract the data in .xml format, the quotations marks
appear in the element's entity. I get,

<middlename>"Pammy"</middlename>

I would have expected Excel to have made the character
substitutions to output the element as,

<middlename>&quot;Pammy&quot;</middlename>

in order to produce valid XML output. Of course, I would
be very careful not to enter such data into my
spreadsheet. However, my goal is to create a turnkey
data entry system for my lab. (Yes, I've been playing
with InfoPath, but our data seems best suited by a
spreadsheet solution.)

I'm using Excel 2003 (11.6113.5703).

---Pam

 

[Pamela Fong]

I thought about this problem for a long time last night
and experimented with the other programs in Office 2003.
I guess the issue is a can of worms. For example, for
Excel to become more fully integrated with the XML world,
it will eventually have to define what encoding the
export should be. With Word 2003, I see that quotes are
not merely single quotes, but can often be replaced by
right-quote and left-quote combinations, and in the UTF-8
format, the characters are something different entirely.
So, I have answered my own question. Will wait for
updates and new editions to find out how all this evolves.

---Pam