Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)

Re:Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?... by edw519 on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @11:10AM (#118973)

"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.

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Re:Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?... by ghiotion on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @11:40AM (#118988)

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.

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Re:Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?... by malkia on Wednesday February 20, 2008 @04:25AM (#119574)

For such type of thing you should always have something at the last column, even return might be enough

A,B,,,,,,,," " C,D,,,,,,,," "

That's newline there between " and "

I guess Excel loads that internally through a convertor, trims the rightmost unused columns, and then saves it that way.

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Re:Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?... by edw519 on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:09PM (#119055)

Never knew that. Once I cut a CSV for someone else, I never wanted to see it again. Now I know why.

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