ARTICLE - Why the MS Office file formats is so complicated

[Jerry Feldman]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:58:53 -0500
Alex Hewitt <hewitt_tech at comcast.net> wrote:

> A friend of ours wrote a bunch of recipe files using something called
> Microsoft Write. Files created with that tool have a .wri extension.
> Theoretically Microsoft Word is supposed to be able to read such files
> but I found that the version I was using (Word 2003) wouldn't. So I
> opened a few of the files with a binary editor and found that every file
> had an 84 hex byte prefix, the file itself in ASCII, a series of bytes
> again in non-ASCII, followed by a repeat of some of the original ASCII.
> Writing a filter in Python was trivial and I was  able to convert the
> files to plain text. Of course some of the lines were no run-on but
> overall the cleanup was simple. But the interesting thing was that I
> couldn't easily find a Microsoft tool that understood the format which
> originated with Windows 95 or an earlier version of Windows. Along the
> way Microsoft had basically given up on the format. I'm sure somewhere
> there is a tool that can read those files short of the original platform
> but we're only talking about perhaps a ten year span since the files
> were created and now are not readily readable.

This is one problem with proprietary formats.  Microsoft dropped
Microsoft Write a while back and as you found out, did not provide
filters in newer versions of Word. This is the type of thing that ODF
is designed to solve. Consider governments with a myriad of
departments, and a lack of intelligible communication between them. One
department might have had low end PCs with Microsoft Write because the
department did not have a budget for Word. Another department might use
another tool, such as Word Perfect.  Unfortunately, Microsoft's OOXML
is not really an open standard. BTW: There is a source forge project
for a Microsoft Write filter. 

-- 
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
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