You learn the most interesting things when you poke around in some of the arcane files that are included with Windows 7 beta releases. In the most recent build of Windows 7 that I’ve been able to examine, I’ve confirmed that Microsoft plans to release its next version of Office in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. That’s a detail that my colleague Mary Jo Foley didn’t discover in her December 2008 rundown of what we know about Office 14

The clues to an upcoming x64 Office release are hidden in an obscure XML file used by the Windows Easy Transfer utility, which transfers settings for Windows and selected applications from an old PC to a new one. In the official beta release of Windows 7 (finalized in December 2008), Migwiz.xml includes the same list of applications found in Windows Vista. But in post-beta builds, this file has been updated to include more modern programs.

Earlier today, as I was scanning through the file to assemble an updated list of applications that can be migrated to Windows 7, this heading caught my eye:

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