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List: koffice-devel
Subject: Fwd: meeting with Microsoft interoperablity people
From: Marijn Kruisselbrink <marijn.kruisselbrink () kogmbh ! com>
Date: 2010-06-30 18:30:03
Message-ID: 201006302030.03992.marijn.kruisselbrink () kogmbh ! com
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Hi all,
18th of June we (Jos van den Oever and myself) met two Microsoft
employees: Doug Mahugh, interoperability contact, and Chris Rea, standards
professional. The volunteered to answer questions about the binary Microsoft
Office formats. Below is a summary of the points discussed. There is no follow
up planned. A forum at msdn.microsoft.com should help us get our further
questions answered.
Q: How does Microsoft deal with documents that are not formatted properly?
A: There is not general approach. Mostly, loading is done in a way that easily
fails but is fast, if it fails a slower more robust method is used.
Q: How can we find out if certain data fragments are simply not documented or
part of an invalid file.
A: There is no general answer. We recommend to try to load it in MS Office and
save it and see if the data is still there.
Q: Is there a grammar file for the Office formats?
A: No, there is not. Microsoft is however a software tool that checks if files
are valid Office files. This tool is a mix of format documentation and code.
This tool should be released in the near future.
Q: Is there a public forum where questions about the binary formats can be
answered?
A: Yes, the forum is available at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-
US/os_binaryfile/threads - if you post questions there then the right people
will end up seeing them and you should get answers reasonably quickly (as I
mentioned, we have an internal goal of resolving any questions posted there
within 30 days).
Q: Do Office files have information about what version of Office saved them?
A: Xls files do, other files probably don't, but Chris Rae will look into it.
Q: What intermediate format does the MS Office import filter use?
A: Chris Rae will look into it.
Q: Is it ok to put a copy of the MS Office file format documentation on a
KOffice server for reference?
A: Probably, the license is liberal, but we're not 100% sure.
Q: What do you think of the approach msoscheme [1] is taking? (we showed them
mso.xml, basis for current koffice ppt filter)
A: Very rigorous. We do it differently, yours is probably a better approach
but we deal with many layers of code from many years.
[1] http://gitorious.org/msoscheme
Marijn Kruisselbrink
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