Thanks Mr thr0waway1239. I would love to answer your questions! I've never built anything even remotely approaching the scale of MS Office...that being said, I

Thanks Mr thr0waway1239. I would love to answer your questions! I've never built anything even remotely approaching the scale of MS Office...that being said, I try not to take the experiences I do have and use them to belittle the work of people in vastly different scenarios. To read the comments in this thread you would think the binary format's of the Office Suite were proof positive that the people at MS were completely incompetent AND Machiavellian enough to make software that worked, but obfuscated it's internals to throw off the most wiley reverse engineers. It reminds me of the way that Republicans say that Obama is the most incompetent bumbler and the most tyrannical schemer playing 3 dimensional chess while continually tripping over his own shoelaces. That was my point. Statistically, most people never do anything great, yet there are so many opinions about how to do great things...we know that most of them must be wrong. Just not OUR opinion, right? We KNOW the right way to do things...not like those assholes...they...blah blah blah. I thought that Joel's article had some good points. It's good to hear some inside knowledge on things sometimes. His point about using libraries to extract data was pretty much the best idea going for a long time when dealing with those documents. I would say that if you have to deal with that stuff these days that the Microsoft Graph is the easiest way to do it. It's a REST api that you can use to create and modify different Office objects. That's just me thinking "how do I do this in the least amount of effort", though. I'm not saying that anybody else should be doing it. The thing is that most of the anti-Microsoft sentiment here is just knee-jerk red team/blue team BS. It's more tribal than it is anything else. I just wish that some of my programming brethren were a little more willing to question some of their own assumptions. So thanks for genuinely engaging me in an open dialog about honest conversation... oh wait...