Ah yes. XML as silver bullet. As in days of yore, when if you had anything remotely object-oriented, it was a Good Thing, now if you have software with XML under the hood it's a Good Thing. I'll be this one came straight from marketing.

Bob,
I have been using CutePDF software for several years to "print" PDF files. It works great and it is free. It appears as a printer in the printer selection list and generates a file in any folder of your choosing.

If this is open season on Microsoft... Did you know if you have a Vista Business PC you can't save files to a Windows Server 2003 network drive? You can save it to your C: drive then 'Move' the file to a network drive. That's just what I want our users to do, deal with file location issues!

Actually, Bob(s)...

I got interested enough to check this out, being a fan of reporting in general and an occasional, albeit unwilling, user of Project...

I think you are supposed to do this with Visual Reports in Project 2007. The templates are Excel and Visio, sure, they're not HTML. But once having exported the Excel version you can Save As HTML (either MHTML single web page or the usual type). That seems to work pretty well.

Yes, it's one more step, Bob L, but the result you get in that intermediate Excel step appears to be a lot more flexible and useful, especially if you feel like tinkering in Excel.

For those of us who do *not* like to tinker, the Excel intermediate version *or* the Excel-based HTML version gives you a result that (IMHO) is at least as good as what you got in Project 2003 -- I'm talking out of the box results here.

FWIW: I'm one of those people who *does* like to tinker. I customized report templates in Project 2003 and swore over it. I don't know for a fact that I will like this better, but from first glance what's available seems a lot more accessible. And this is before I get anywhere near XML, although I'm happy to know that eventually I could do that if I had the need. I do agree that Project 2007 doesn't seem like a full-fledged member of the family -- neither does InfoPath -- but that is a whole nuther story.

Bob G (since I happen to know you): quit yer bellyachin' . Who cares what vendors say, and who cares whether OOP is a silver bullet, or XML is, or not. All marketing speak aside, they are both Very Good Things. And you *know* that...

>L. Who cares what vendors say, and who cares whether OOP is a silver bullet, or XML is, or not. All marketing speak aside, they are both Very Good Things. And you *know* that...

>L

As someone who is currently hip deep wading in the XML waters with Office, I can honestly say it is a good thing. I am a developer and I have to make things work for users who are not developers but want to work with the data that our system produces. It is complex, but at least do-able. The old proprietary format, even when using the object model inside office, was a pain. I can now work on the document directly, then present it back to the user for opening in Word, or after I get better at this, in other ways. Although I am not generally a Microsoft fanboy, I think they did this right-er than usual.