Sunday, July 27, 2008

Implementing the Office Binary Formats

Microsoft released the Office binary format specification earlier in the year and I'm going through a fair few thousand pages of spec building .Net libraries to read and write the files at the byte level.

Below is an errata which I'll keep up-to-date during the process.


OfficeDrawing97-2007BinaryFormatSpecification.pdf

Various types aren't correct

STD is used as a default but never described
MSOCOLORNONE is used as a default but never described


P44 refers to MSOSRH, MSOPRH, MSOPV and MSOPRV which aren't documented anywhere

P49 says line left style twice but should probably say Line Row Style

P51 wzSigSetupProvId claims to be property 192 but is 1922

P52 refers to msopctSizeNone and msopctPosNone and MSOSRH which aren't defined anywhere

No documentation is provided for the additional line styles' extended color information