My first task in the industry, in the early 90's, involved writing to excel files. At the time I worked at microsoft, so you'd have thought they'd have given m

My first task in the industry, in the early 90's, involved writing to excel files. At the time I worked at microsoft, so you'd have thought they'd have given me the super secret documentation to the excel format. Instead, they gave me a book published by microsoft press, describing the BIFF format which is what they'd called the format, apparently dreaming that it might one day become a semi-open standard for spreadsheets. (there was no danger of that ever happening, the format was distilled madness, based on a million performance optimizations) Later they made the format a lot saner, but either way I'm pretty sure google would be fine.