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In the early days Excel focused heavily on compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3 which was dominant. Excel never obfuscated their save code. I've seen it in person. T
by slededit 8y ago
In the early days Excel focused heavily on compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3 which was dominant.
Excel never obfuscated their save code. I've seen it in person. They did just memcpy their data structures, which was the most efficient way to save on tiny machines of the day. Lotus did that too.
I've also seen and helped implement the Open Document spec. This is not a simple problem and you are doing yourself a disservice by blinding yourself to the scale of the task.
If you want to make an impact and don't have Google level budgets then leveraging OpenOffice is the only sane approach.
- osrec 8y agoI was under the impression they did attempt to obfuscate their files. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_POI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_POI We don't have Google level budgets, but I think we can do something worthwhile with what we have. Might take a while, but I'm confident we will manage something good in the budget we are hoping to allocate to the task.
- slededit 8y agoFUD goes both ways and the OpenDocument battle was particularly vicious on both sides. However the code is literally a memcpy of a struct that is used internally. Not being designed for others to easily read isn't obfuscation. FWIW the XML formats designed for that purpose still fail horribly on that front. Anyways I've worked on spreadsheets for 10 years. File compatibility is the hard part and the rest is easy by comparison (but still pretty hard).