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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)."

3 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. ,,, or undo file corruption? by MickLinux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know it's old hat by now, but back in the Office 98 days, file corruption was a big deal.

    I wonder what was going on, but it occurs to me that now I could concievably actually back out
    the errors, and figure the thing out.

    --
    Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
  2. So that's only about 2400 pages! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A far cry from the 6,000 pages for OOXML ..

  3. interesting... by AmaDaden · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Did anyone else notice this is coming out on the first business day at MS that is Gates free...?