For the early versions of Excel for Windows, 1 MB of RAM was a reasonable amount of memory, and an 80386 at 20 MHz had to be able to run Excel comfortably. They were designed to be fast on very old computers. The first thing to understand is that the binary file formats were designed with very different design goals than, say, HTML. With a little bit of digging, I’ll show you how those file formats got so unbelievably complicated, why it doesn’t reflect bad programming on Microsoft’s part, and what you can do to work around it.
These are sufficiently complicated that you have to read another 9 page spec to figure that out.
You see, Excel 97-2003 files are OLE compound documents, which are, essentially, file systems inside a single file. But wait, that’s not all there is to it! This document includes the following interesting comment:Įach Excel workbook is stored in a compound file.
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The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office.