Summing up we've this situation: 1. MS uses a proprietary storage format: Ole Storage. It's structure is meanwhile well known, one can retrieve the actual application dependent documents easily. 2. The application dependent documents are partially documented by MS, partially by others. 3. Documentations aren't complete anyway. The binary documents contain most relevant undocument data portions.(It's obviously due to automatic serialization strategies applied by MS: easy to apply but practically not documentable; not even by MS themselves. This leads to the funny situation that people reverse engeneering the file formats understand them better than MS;-)). I'm working on Word, Excel and PowerPoint intensively for about six years now and can say: it is possible to understand all of these portions. 4. The WMF/EMF/PICT image formats are not sufficiently supported on alien platforms. Even this: on Macs xMF looks ugly, on Windows PICT drawings look ugly. Not a too big problem compared to the rest, but it's not yet solved. 5. MS XML support simplifies the understanding of the docformats even more. 6. Quite a bunch of information is not stored in the documents but in the application; only the variations from default are stored in the documents. It requires quite some efforts to rebuild this data yourself, but is is possible. Summed up: The knowledge about document formats is no longer a problem. The problem is rather to get the knowledge focused on free applications. I'm afraid it requires management actions from this side. PS: Did you know that MS stores GIF files as PNGs in their documents?:)
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Summing up we've this situation: 1. MS uses a proprietary storage format: Ole Storage. It's structure is meanwhile well known, one can retrieve the actual application dependent documents easily. 2. The application dependent documents are partially documented by MS, partially by others. 3. Documentations aren't complete anyway. The binary documents contain most relevant undocument data portions.(It's obviously due to automatic serialization strategies applied by MS: easy to apply but practically not documentable; not even by MS themselves. This leads to the funny situation that people reverse engeneering the file formats understand them better than MS ;-)). I'm working on Word, Excel and PowerPoint intensively for about six years now and can say: it is possible to understand all of these portions. 4. The WMF/EMF/PICT image formats are not sufficiently supported on alien platforms. Even this: on Macs xMF looks ugly, on Windows PICT drawings look ugly. Not a too big problem compared to the rest, but it's not yet solved. 5. MS XML support simplifies the understanding of the docformats even more. 6. Quite a bunch of information is not stored in the documents but in the application; only the variations from default are stored in the documents. It requires quite some efforts to rebuild this data yourself, but is is possible. Summed up: The knowledge about document formats is no longer a problem. The problem is rather to get the knowledge focused on free applications. I'm afraid it requires management actions from this side. PS: Did you know that MS stores GIF files as PNGs in their documents? :)