Comments on: Proprietary Open XML Extensions (Already!)

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:10:29 +0000

Thanks for the nice post!

By: shane

shane — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:52:48 +0000

Thank you, Stephane. We've had a huge influx of trolling as of the last few days, and perhaps are a bit on edge. There is no doubt from your first linked article (I didn't read the pdf yet) that you are well versed in the OOXML spec. I love the fact that we do have discussions on the site, and want to encourage further discussion and corrections. I want our arguments to withstand scrutiny, and encourage any readers to question or comment on our premises. Let's all just keep it mature, and there is no reason to post using pseudonyms folks, just type in "anonymous" or "i disagree". I still do not intend to censor any non-spam comments, nor shut down commenting after x number of days on an article, since many are still actively being viewed and linked to.

By: Stephane Rodriguez

Stephane Rodriguez — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:41:50 +0000

If you think I may be a paid shill, take a look at this : http://xlsgen.arstdesign.com/special/OOXML_objections.pdf

(this is on my website)

The OOXML specs are so bad I had to develop my own tool, called “diffopc”, to make any progress in my product (an Excel file format component which recently added partial support for Excel 2007).

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 17:47:52 +0000

Thank you for the information, Stephane. For the record, I notice that you are among the Open XML team members:

http://openxmldeveloper.org/members/Stephane+Rodriguez.aspx

Also, yesterday’s news indicate that Microsoft pays people to “bring balance” to content which speaks about Open XML. I just hope you are not being paid to post here.

In any event, your comment does not invalidate the fact that Open XML has undocumented, binary parts.

By: Stephane Rodriguez

Stephane Rodriguez — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 17:27:47 +0000

I am a new visitor. While I find your blog instructive (subscribed), I’d like to shed some light on a confusion here.

VBA projects are encoded in bin parts in the new Office 2007 file formats, whether it’s Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Those parts are the actual VBA streams that we find in older versions of the corresponding applications. That’s a direct extraction.

There are other binary parts, such as printer settings parts and OLE objects parts.

The new XLSB file format pushes XLSM even further by making the important XML parts encoded in much the same way than BIFF used to do with older versions. Actually, those bin parts are christened as BIFF12. BIFF12 is undocumented right now.

I have written an article on the subject here :
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/office2007bin.asp