Re:Excel Labs, a Microsoft Garage Project
by tomjakubowski on Friday May 26, 2023 @11:43AM
(#36085644)
XLSX is openly documented and free to use without royalty, it's not proprietary
Re:Excel Labs, a Microsoft Garage Project
by resoluteteeth on Friday May 26, 2023 @01:11PM
(#36086940)
The OOXML format is heavily oriented around internal details of Office in ways that makes it pretty inconvenient to work with even if it's "open". Also IIRC some more esoteric parts are just binary blobs that aren't actually documented and the specifications just say to do what Office does.
Maybe... but I wouldn't be so quick as to assume bad intent ("never attribute to malice", etc.)
What's the deal with "copy" for example? Why does the source of the copy have to be highlighted, why is it so fragile, why does it disappear from the clipboard when one presses the Escape key? This has been the case since I think the very first version of Excel, and never changed.
I don't know of any other program that works that way. It didn't make sense then (I think), and it doesn't make sense now.
Both of these things are consistent with trying to keep users in Excel. Make it easy to accidentally open Excel, but don’t make it too convenient to use open data formats when you have a proprietary one.