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Compatibility of Office Formats |
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Written by Nenad Karalic
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Saturday, 04 October 2008 |
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Page 2 of 2
XLS format test
Although programs for tabular data manipulation kept basic concept of original VisiCalc, in time they gained many advanced options. After many years of war for domination in Spreadsheet tables’ field, MS Excel made persuasive domination and imposed its format as logical choice for data exchange in this section. Besides DOC format, Office suites are unthinkable without spreadsheet program. In MS Office suite, Excel is in charge of this section, and it keeps data in binary file format with XLS extension. Current version of MS Office uses XLSX (Office Open XML) format. Although Excel can save data in several different formats, depending on weather you want to save entire work book or just some parts of it, we will consider only entire work book as universal format.
OpenOffice had no problesms with our test document, which was displayed accurately. The same goes for charts. Compatibility between different spreadsheet programs is not only important in case of visual representation of document. Attention also has to be paid on functions and different formulas which can lead to completely incorrect results sometimes. However, we used only basic mathematical operations for the test, so we didn’t encounter any major variation. Support for XLSX still doesn’t exist in OpenOffice Calc 2.4, while Google Docs still possesses only basic chart support, and gets into trouble with advanced XLS format charts.
Conclusion
Considering results of this test, it may seem that data exchange in different freeware suites can be problematic, but in practice it is not always like that. Bigger problems can occur if we use complex documents, which is relatively rare occasion. Users of MS suite are in privilege in this case, because if they need to open a document made by freeware suite, they can always install needed suite free of charge, and in case of Google Docs all they need is Internet connection.
Maybe it is good to mention that if documents are used only for reading, on Microsoft website can be found free viewers for Word and Excel formats. Regarding DOCX and XLSX formats, Microsoft launched Office Compatibility Pack which enables converting of these formats into adequate DOC or XLS formats. If, however, you need to share a document with many people, and you want to allow them to change it if they need to, just try to keep it as simplest as it can be.
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