Q: What is XML?
XML (extensible markup language) provides an environment in which data objects ("tags") can be a priori defined to have specific characteristics, and relationship to each other. It is comparable to defining a database of variables. The definition file (myXMLdefinitionfile.xsd) is called a "schema" definition file (.xsd stands for XML schema definition file). Schema is just another name for a model or template.
Q: What does this have to do with Excel?
Excel 2003 and later versions have built-in capability to operate with .xml files (edit, import, export and the like). The .xml file can be "mapped" to an Excel spreadsheet. This "mapping" allows an Excel model, or spreadsheet calculation to operate on data from arbitrary sources - as long as the schema for the data exists. This approach was used in a recent application in which the same data was in different places in different versions of an Excel data template.
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