A lot of people still use excel right now, even if it was released many years ago. It is still one of the programs that people can use for their different projects and business needs. Excel is affected by the change from XLS of the file to XML. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, and this is a type of markup language and not a file format as what people have assumed.
XML is known to be text based so it can be opened in different text editors. XLS is known to have a binary file format which can make this more exclusive. This is the main difference between the two. XLS is a file format while the XML is not.