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A file from 1997? Maybe if you get lucky, but there's also a good chance that it will simply look wrong in any office application you try. With Word you can't e
by alpaca128 3y ago
A file from 1997? Maybe if you get lucky, but there's also a good chance that it will simply look wrong in any office application you try. With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting. That was the reason I learned TeX.
And games? Microsoft broke numerous games by shutting down GFWL. I had to pirate Dark Souls as my original copy wasn't playable until it got re-released on Steam.
- gruez 3y ago>With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting. Source? This seems utterly bizarre.
- benjaminpv 3y agoI don't know if anything's changed but for a long time a lot of Word's formatting was impacted by the printer you had installed and/or selected. So it was pretty easy to run into scenarios on a network where printers being taken offline/their capabilities changed resulted in documents getting reformatted.
- alpaca128 3y agoDifficult to prove considering that was a decade ago, but it did happen to me. Randomly changed font in a random paragraph, randomly repositioned images, etc. Maybe I accidentally broke the document in some way, I don't know, but Word certainly failed to restore it to the exact state it was saved in, and it was always on the same PC and software.
- apetresc 3y agoBefore the new '.docx`, '.xslx', etc. formats, when it was still just .doc, .xsl, etc., the document format was (as I've heard it told) essentially just a memory dump of Word/Excel's state for that document at the time you saved. And since it's easy to imagine that serializing/deserializing such a complex thing might not be always 100% perfectly idempotent, it would indeed happen that just the act of opening a file would change it in some subtle way. That hasn't been the case in a long time, though.
- repler 3y agothe new formats are actually zip archives believe it or not
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoThey are ZIP archives... of XML. That's what the 'x' stands for in '.docx', '.xlsx', '.pptx', etc; it is Office Open XML[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#:~:text=Office%20Open%20XML%20(also%20informally,initial%20version%20as%20ECMA%2D376 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#:~:text=Office....
- esafak 3y agoThey were reportedly written as memory dumps for speed. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- jeffparsons 3y agoWorse than subtle formatting changes was some kind of corruption that could slowly swallow bits of your document without you noticing. Sometimes going back before the corruption had visible effects was not good enough to stop it from manifesting again. I remember back in school religiously saving new versions of Word documents so that if the newest version went bad I could start a fresh doc, then copy and paste sections from old versions via Notepad to cleanse the corruption. (Direct Word-to-Word could bring it across — I guess that tells us something about how they implemented copy+paste between documents, too!)
- reddalo 3y agoYou're right, Office documents were essentialy a memory dump, but only for Office <= 95 if I recall correctly. Starting from Office 97, they switched to an improved .doc, .xsl, etc. file format (even though it was still binary). That's why modern software such as Office itself or LibreOffice call the .doc format "Microsoft Word 97/2003"
- mnw21cam 3y agoI had the same with OpenOffice (before LibreOffice was a thing). I created a nice document while logged in remotely to a Linux computer over Xvnc. When I opened it on the native terminal, the layout was different. Same computer, same version of OpenOffice, different X server.