Comments on: Office 2007 documents are zipped XML

By: A surprise with Emacs and Office 2007 — The Endeavour

A surprise with Emacs and Office 2007 — The Endeavour — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 15:38:15 +0000

[...] was disorienting at first. Then I thought about how Office 2007 documents are zipped XML files. But how does dired know that my .xlsx file is a zip file? I suppose since Emacs is a Unix [...]

By: Clutter-discoverability trade-off — The Endeavour

Clutter-discoverability trade-off — The Endeavour — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:56:05 +0000

[...] Office 2007 documents are zipped XML Good user interface design: EpiPen Bad user interface design: hotel showers ? X [...]

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:52:59 +0000

I believe this storage format was initiated by OpenOffice (actually Sun Microsystems).

By: wcoenen

wcoenen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:57:04 +0000

This is also good to know because it has an impact on the efficiency of version control systems. Compression basically sabotages the ability of subversion (or any other version control system) to generate small deltas.

I have answered this question about it on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1320654/will-subversion-efficiently-store-openxml-office-documents

By: Mike Woodhouse

Mike Woodhouse — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:35:00 +0000

This actually may be one of the coolest things about Office 2007+, particularly for anyone who’s ever suffered the agony of BIFF files.

By: Jeromy Anglim

Jeromy Anglim — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:34:48 +0000

I agree. I also had the experience where one of my Excel files became corrupted. I was able to extract the relevant material by changing the file extension to zip and exploring the components. I blogged about it here (http://bit.ly/27be6l).