Redmond, Wash.--For most of their 20 years, Word and Excel documents have had free rein within corporate walls.
In the early days, workers used an array of floppy disks to shuttle documents created with the programs from department to department. E-mail let the files become even more far-flung, easily moving them among branch offices around the globe. But with the advent of federal record-keeping regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which impose strict rules on how companies manage and archive information, those freewheeling days are nearly at an end. That"s a big deal to Microsoft, which wants to make sure that however the rules change, businesses are still using Excel (and Word and PowerPoint) for their computerized files.