I. Overview

The Office 97 Binder's storage format consists of the following components:

ISummaryInformation and IDocumentSummaryInformation – the streams that describe the properties of the binder, these are standard across all Office docfiles

Binder – the main binder stream

HdrFtr – this stream stores information regarding any header/footer applied across the binder sections

DocRouting – this stream used to save information regarding any routing slip attached t

One substorage per section contained in the binder

This document focuses on the Binder stream. The property streams are standard across all the Office docfiles are not discussed here. The HdrFtr and DocRouting streams are relevant only in the context of shared header/footers across a binder document or when routing binders via mail.

The Binder stream has 2 main sections, described below:

  • DOCHEADER: this has information such as the length of DOCHEADER structure, min. & max. version number, Binder GUID, count of sections, index of the active section, index of first visible section in the left pane, total edit time for the binder, creation time, time of last printing, last save time and state information (e.g., left pane's visibility, status bar visibility).
  • SECTIONRECORD – there is one of these per section. This has things like the length of the record (this structure is variable length), section GUID, section state (e.g., whether it is active, selected, visible, etc.), storage number, offset to the display name record, etc..
Section II below contains the header file describing all the relevant data structures for the Office 97 Binder file format.