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A comment on The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP. Parent comment

Re:The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP by signal11 on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @10:32AM (#21453221)
I'm not very sure about Word, but Excel 97 onwards, Excel's story around forward and backward compatibility has been very good -- the Excel equivalent of the scenario you describe wouldn't happen, because of the introduction of Future Record Types[1].

These are still used in the newer XLSB format[2].

[1] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/digformatsp... (Page 14)

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_forma...

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Re:The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP by unilynx on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @01:57PM (#21455442)
Word, Excel and Powerpoint were forwards and backwards compatible from 1997 to 2004. The newer versions emitted various backward compatible formatting (eg Word 2000 supported table-in-table, but emitted sufficient formatting for Word 97 to at least see one level of tables and consider the rest of the cells to be paragraphs)

It was far from bug-free though.

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