Wondering about Excel 11 "XML import"

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

 Maybe slightly off-topic, but that's IMHO a relevant issue
for gnumeric future. While reading Jean Paoli (XML head at Microsoft)
blurb on adding capabilities to import/export XML from M$ tools,
I got interested in the following excerpt:

  http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/11/14/021114opwebserv.xml

-------------
When you suck raw XML data into Excel 11, the XPath expressions that
target elements are written for you, and subsetting and rearranging the
data reduces to dragging XML-mapped elements onto the spreadsheet. It's
a huge win.
-------------

  Seems to me they added a smart "any XML" import feature in Excel 11
which tries to interpret the structure and fold it into the row/column
framework of the spreadsheet. And of course I'm wondering:
   - how smart it is? I.e. how does it work in practice, doing that
     structure -> array remapping may have tons of heuristics to make
     it behave in a useful fashion
   - shouldn't something similar be added into Gnumeric (if not already)?
     Having XML as a default format is one thing but importing unconstrained
     XML can potentially be really useful considering XML is getting
     ubiquitous when people want to exchange data.

  I'm left wondering, maybe people here have first hand experience with
Excel 11, or have viewpoints on this,

Daniel

-- 
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