Open an excel file with open office, save it, and you will find that O.O. appends random quantities of blank text to random cells. I've had files at least quintuple in size due to this feature. I discovered the problem when reading Excel files with Apache Jakarta's POI library.
I've banned everyone in the office from touching any of my Excel files with O.O., under penalty of a severely foamy-mouthed and long-winded berating.
BTW I gotta give credit to those POI folks for enduring the difficult & thankless task of working with a series of formats thought up by a bunch of MS employees - individuals who clearly were not only stone drunk, but criminally insane, and mentally retarded to boot.
I think leaky abstractions are why there are so many useless stupid java companies out there that build fancy-pants systems that supposedly make it easier for inexperienced programmers to generate applications. By the time you get their fancy pants software development system working, you realize you could've built your app just as quickly and easily without their crap, and with greater control, flexibility and customizability.
An acquaintance recently dissed me for saying it was important to understand SQL when building java information systems. He declared that any of the object-relational mapping tools on the market completely obviate the need to know SQL, a "low-level language". Yeah, RIGHT, junior.
Every now and then something actually useful like Ant comes along, but the truth is, the basic JDK has most of the great stuff built in. My destiny as a Java programmer is to build a minimum of clever reuseable tools, and a maximum of customized code for specific customer problems.
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Open an excel file with open office, save it, and you will find that O.O. appends random quantities of blank text to random cells. I've had files at least quintuple in size due to this feature. I discovered the problem when reading Excel files with Apache Jakarta's POI library.
I've banned everyone in the office from touching any of my Excel files with O.O., under penalty of a severely foamy-mouthed and long-winded berating.
BTW I gotta give credit to those POI folks for enduring the difficult & thankless task of working with a series of formats thought up by a bunch of MS employees - individuals who clearly were not only stone drunk, but criminally insane, and mentally retarded to boot.
"(pardon me, 'nookyuler.' Bush can't be wrong about something as simple as pronunciation, can he?)"
Actually it's a legit pronunciation. Check it at www.m-w.com.
Dunno if anybody else posted a link to this, but it's a pretty darn good flick that might improve your understanding of the situation: Safe
I think leaky abstractions are why there are so many useless stupid java companies out there that build fancy-pants systems that supposedly make it easier for inexperienced programmers to generate applications. By the time you get their fancy pants software development system working, you realize you could've built your app just as quickly and easily without their crap, and with greater control, flexibility and customizability.
An acquaintance recently dissed me for saying it was important to understand SQL when building java information systems. He declared that any of the object-relational mapping tools on the market completely obviate the need to know SQL, a "low-level language". Yeah, RIGHT, junior.
Every now and then something actually useful like Ant comes along, but the truth is, the basic JDK has most of the great stuff built in. My destiny as a Java programmer is to build a minimum of clever reuseable tools, and a maximum of customized code for specific customer problems.