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Microsoft's Office file-formats are now public. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx At
by mahmud 14y ago
Microsoft's Office file-formats are now public.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx
At least in principle. Not sure if there are critical omissions that might hinder interop. Devil's in the details, and such ..
- bradleyland 14y agoFrom a practical perspective, I'd say the open formats have, at least, improved the situation. I don't have much experience with the word processing document formats, but every tool I've used that worked with the old Excel BIFF8 format failed hard. BIFF8 was never officially released as a standard, so everyone's work was the result of reverse engineering. The results were really bad. We recently started the transition from the old Spreadsheet (Ruby) gem, which targeted BIFF8 format, to the Axlsx gem, which targets OOXML format. The results are so, so much better. Spreadsheets generated with the old Spreadsheet gem work presentationally, but features of Excel are broken when you open the resulting documents. We also ran in to issues when generating very large documents with lots of formatting. All of these problems are gone with Axlsx.
- randym 14y agoglad to hear you are happy with axlsx. If you are doing excel, libre office, numbers or even google docs from Ruby, give it a spin.
- bradleyland 14y agoI can't thank you enough for the work you've done with axlsx. The API is very similar to a wrapper we wrote for Spreadsheet. I think it speaks volumes for software when you find that it works exactly as you expect it to.