Microsoft Releases Office Binary Formats

Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."

Comments

Office Doc Generation on the Server

[VosotrosForm]

I would like to point out another good option Joel doesn't have on his list. It's a software called OfficeWriter, from a company named SoftArtisans in Boston. When I last checked/worked there, it was capable of generating Excel and Word docs on the server, and I believe Powerpoint was probably coming relatively soon. Creating a product that can write office documents isn't quite as impossible in terms of labor as Joel is saying.... but it's still way beyond any hobby project. Plus, he is suggesting that you use Excel automation or the like through scripts to create documents on the server, which is a decent suggestion, if you want Excel or Word to constantly crash and lock up your server, and you enjoy rebooting them every day. If you want to do large scale document generation on a server you are going to need something like Officewriter. -Vosotros/Matt

Re:patent promise doesn't sound very good

[ContractualObligatio]

If there are any optional parts of the spec, those parts aren't covered.

RTFA. That's in the FAQ. Yes they are.

If the spec refers to another spec to define some part of the format, that part isn't covered.

In other words - if you do something related to a spec that isn't covered, it isn't covered. How could it be any different?!

I'm not saying that there aren't any flaws, but this kind of ill informed, badly thought out comment (a.k.a. "+5 Insightful", of course) has little value.

Re:Joel

[zootm]

I'm not going to say anything against the Microsoft doc; he's pretty much absolutely right and it's a great introduction to why older formats are how they are in general to boot.

The Hungarian thing – no, I still don't see it. Hungarian should not be used in any language which has a reasonable typing system; it's essentially adding unverifiable documentation to variable names in a way that is unnecessary, in a language which can verify type assertions perfectly well. The examples in the article are just ones where good variable naming would have been more than sufficient. It's not good enough.

Oh god I've started another hungarian argument.

Re:One possible reason for releasing the specs now

[Chief Camel Breeder]

Actually, I think they're releasing it now because they were ordered to in a (European?) court settlement, not because they want to.

Re:Joel

[mhall119]

Programmers didn't understand why Hungarian originally used his famous notation It wasn't created by some guy named "Hungarian", it was created by Charles Simonyi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

Re:patent promise doesn't sound very good

[jsight]

Hurr hurr. The Microsoft implementation of Java wasn't buggy: far from it, it was actually superior to the Sun implementation. It was faster and integrated better with Windows.

Among other issues, borderlayoutmanager did not behave properly in MS's implementation. It was buggy in incompatible ways, but your right, that in and of itself wasn't the big problem. The big problem was their insistence on both not fixing the bugs, and not going along with major initiatives (such as JFC/Swing).

But back in the day, the Microsoft J++ development environment was far superior to anything Sun had to offer. We're talking a good 10 years ago. Sun has finally managed to catch up in the past two or three years, but still, Sun's problem wasn't that the Microsoft implementation was worse: their problem was that it was better.

If by "2 or 3 years" you mean about 5 years, then I'd agree. Java development tools didn't really reach maturity until things like Eclipse came onto the scene about 5 years ago.

Re: "compound documents." oh no, run away!

[Thundersnatch]

Anyways, it's no surprise that it's all the OLE, spreadsheet-object-inside-a-document, stuff that would make it difficult to design a Word killer. (How often to people actually use that anyway?)

At my company, our users do that every day. Excel spreadsheets embedded in Word or PowerPoint, Microsoft office Chart objects embedded in everything. It's what made the Word/Excel/PowerPoint "Office Suite" a killer app for businesses. MS Office integration beat the pants of the once best-of-breed and dominant Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. When you embed documents in Office, instead of a static image, the embedded doc is editable in the same UI, and can be linked to another document maintained by somebody else and updated automatically. It saves tremendous amounts of staff time.

Re:patent promise doesn't sound very good

[ozmanjusri]

Microsoft implementation of Java wasn't buggy: far from it, it was actually superior to the Sun implementation. It was faster and integrated better with Windows.

Ah, marketing. Where would we be without it?

Microsoft developed J/Direct specifically to make Java non-portable to other OSs. The MS JVM wasn't better than Suns, it was just tied heavily into the OS, and code developed for it broke if run on any other VM.

J++ was another lockin tool to ensure any "Java" developed in Microsoft's IDE would only run on Microsoft OSs. JBuilder was always a better package anyway.