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Microsoft Releases Pre-2007 Binary File Format Specs

Posted by timothy on from the in-exchange-they-can-read-the-odf-spec dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released the specifications for the binary file formats used by pre-2007 Microsoft Office applications. They're accurate this time! Honest! While the documents are enormous (Word alone requires 533 pages; Excel runs over 1000 plus another 850 pages for the Office 2007 binary format), they hopefully will be useful to developers trying to create or extract information from Microsoft Office files (which despite their flaws, have been the de facto standard in many fields for some time now)."

5 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. I think the real question by bragolach · · Score: 5, Funny

    is WHEN are they going to release the source code to the Flight Sim in Excel 98?

    1. Re:I think the real question by MiniMike · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's actually hidden in the released documents. You have to go to a specific page of the Excel portion, and by starting at a specific line and skipping the correct numbers of lines between read lines, the spec will be revealed. The exact details are left as an exercise for the morbidly curious.

  2. Chicken and Egg by BobNET · · Score: 5, Funny

    The only problem? They released them in Word format...

    (Okay, not really -- someone must have realized that that would be silly.)

  3. Re:How freaking "open" of them... by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, but at least they offer the appearance of wanting to feel like changing...

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  4. are we clear ? by rs232 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Crystal clear to me .. :)

    --
    davecb5620@gmail.com