Office 12 FIle Spec and ZIP

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Thread: Office 12 FIle Spec and ZIP

Office 12 FIle Spec and ZIP
Posted: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:49 PM (EST)

Microsoft has announced a new XML based file specification for Office (at least for Excel and Word). The default saved files will be XML and Zipped. In fact a user can add their own contents to the zip which should be unchanged by the base programs. Pretty exciting stuff. What it really means is you'll be able to create and Excel spreadsheet WITHOUT requiring Excel on the machine.

To make it more interesting MS is creating a patch to prior verions of Office to allow them to interchange files. Going back to Office 2000.

So the direction question is: Should APL provide a Zip function built in or as a call or our will users prefer to use a COM addin such as Dynazip?

.NET has it built in so it's only an issue for APL+Win (and maybe APL+Linux). /Eric

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Author Thread:

davin.church

Office 12 FIle Spec and ZIP
Posted: Thursday, June 23, 2005 11:52 PM (EST)

Does that mean that such a ZIP function would be able to read and write standard ZIP files, or only something special to Office? I've done some digging into doing this myself, but I never got a chance to finish things off. There are standard LZH compression libraries that can be called (with some significant knowledge & effort), but these normally only produce the compressed version of the data, and the rest of the file's wrapper (table of contents, etc.) is left for further processing. In general, I think we should have a fairly easy way to read/write commercial ZIP files, as well as doing low-level compression/decompression directly to/from variables (i.e. without going through an external file step). Much of the world uses ZIP files to pass data around, and it'd be really nice if we could work on them directly. BTW, one use for string-compression is that HTTP compression uses those same mechanisms to pass data around easier (and some sites require its use).

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