[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

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
[Download RAW message or body]

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
_______________________________________________
koffice-devel mailing list
koffice-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]