Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
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Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#2[deleted]
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#3I call bullshit. A lot of his arguments perhaps make sense for early versions of Office, but for '97 and later? It didn't occur to anyone on the Word or Excel teams in 1997 that maybe interoperability would be an issue?
I really enjoy Joel's blog, but sometimes I can't stand the clubbish-ness of the old-school Microsoft brigade. "We were a bunch of geniuses, doing the best we could..." Yeah, well, the software is usable, but it kinda sucks. Don't be surprised if the people MS victimized for a decade sound critical now that we can all see how the sausage gets made.
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#4"If you simply have to produce tabular data for use in Excel, consider CSV."
That's what most of us have been doing for years, simply to avoid the mess discussed in this article.
After reading the article, I, for one, will keep on doing it.
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#5I call bullshit. A lot of his arguments perhaps make sense for early versions of Office, but for '97 and later? It didn't occur to anyone on the Word or Excel teams in 1997 that maybe interoperability would be an issue? I really enjoy Joel's blog, but sometimes I can't stand the clubbish-ness of the old-school Microsoft brigade. "We were a bunch of geniuses, doing the best we could..." Yeah, well, the software is usa…
Sure, they realized interoperability would be important. But by 1995 customers were already whining about how often the file format changed. Nobody would buy Office (n+1) if it would start writing documents in a format that Office (n) didn't understand, because interoperability means precisely that you can't get everyone to upgrade at the same time. So they did a remarkably good job of holding the file formats stable and backwards and forwards compatible for about ten years. Look in the Excel spec and you'll see how much work when into allowing old verisons of Excel to preserve and roundtrip future features they don't understand.
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#6MSFT is releasing specs only after the EU is basically forcing them to, and in the year 2008. Please don't try to tell me their formats are not deliberately obfuscated.
If a format's goal truly was to maintain forward/backward compatibility while remaining friendly toward low-end hardware, then it wouldn't be so hard to reverse engineer.
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#7"If you simply have to produce tabular data for use in Excel, consider CSV." That's what most of us have been doing for years, simply to avoid the mess discussed in this article. After reading the article, I, for one, will keep on doing it.
I ran into a nasty bug(?) recently in the way Excel processes CSVs. I create a well formed CSV from a Java Web app which the user downloads. They open the CSV up in Excel and modify the data for an eventual upload. However, during the save process, Excel truncates trailing commas. Which causes my well formed CSV to be a poorly formed CSV during upload and parsing. Not fun.
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#8"The idea of things like SGML and HTML—interchangeable, standardized file formats—didn’t really take hold until the Internet made it practical to interchange documents in the first place; this was a decade later than the Office binary formats were first invented."
Put another way, Microsoft didn't care about interop until they were convicted of illegal monopolistic practices and they couldn't get away with the kind of shit reflected in this spec anymore.
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#9Joel starts out by telling you that Microsoft's file formats are not the product of a demented Borg mind and are not impossible to read or create correctly.
And then he spends the rest of the article explaining why the file formats are so demented and impossible to read or create correctly.
Which isn't the same thing at all. Just because there is a rich history of it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time decisions doesn't mean the end result is any good.
There is a serious, deep, and interesting problem of scaling and complexity management that could be discussed here. But Microsoft's approach seems to have been one of embracing complexity. And Joel's role, today, is just defending that approach.
Re: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
#10I call bullshit. A lot of his arguments perhaps make sense for early versions of Office, but for '97 and later? It didn't occur to anyone on the Word or Excel teams in 1997 that maybe interoperability would be an issue? I really enjoy Joel's blog, but sometimes I can't stand the clubbish-ness of the old-school Microsoft brigade. "We were a bunch of geniuses, doing the best we could..." Yeah, well, the software is usa…
Sure, they realized interoperability would be important. But by 1995 customers were already whining about how often the file format changed. Nobody would buy Office (n+1) if it would start writing documents in a format that Office (n) didn't understand, because interoperability means precisely that you can't get everyone to upgrade at the same time. So they did a remarkably good job of holding the file formats stable…
Ok, then take a look at how HTML does forward compatibility, for example. Extremely simple, elegant. Not that i defend lexable-parsable formats - I got the point that speed was important on stone-age computers. No. It's about architecture.
Here is what I think: nobody at Microsoft ever cared about making anything simpler than what they got after the first approximation, because complexity looks impressive and hence sells better. On the other hand, making things simpler requires more intellectual efforts and usually doesn't sell well, especially in the consumer product business.