You’d of thought it was easy to view XML documents in a friendly format, what with it being a universal data standard and heavily promoted by the likes of Microsoft for the last 10 years (or something like that!).

But I always found it a bit of a struggle to get a decent free viewer which just let you view data in a human readable, tabulated format without having to provide a corresponding xslt document.

Well it turns out that Excel 2007 and 2010 provides support for this.  All you need to do is drag ‘n drop your well formed XML document into Excel and it will do the rest of the work for you.

In seconds you will have the Excel worksheet in front of you with nicely tabulated data.

Personally I have found it very useful for easily analysing SQL Server Profiler trace files, proof below;

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