INFO: Support for the Microsoft Office Binary File Formats

ID: Q239653

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Office 97 for Windows
Microsoft Word 97 for Windows
Microsoft Excel 97 for Windows
Microsoft Access versions 2000, 97
Microsoft PowerPoint versions 2000, 97 For Windows
Microsoft Office 2000
Microsoft Word 2000
Microsoft Excel 2000

SUMMARY

This article describes the availability of support for the Microsoft Office file formats.

MORE INFORMATION

Microsoft Excel

The Microsoft Excel binary file format is supported. There is a helpful tool for analyzing the contents of Microsoft Excel files called BiffView.exe that comes with the Microsoft Excel SDK listed in the "References" section of this article. For additional information about Microsoft Excel binary file format, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q224518 HOWTO: Determine If an Excel Workbook Contains Macros

Q178605 HOWTO: Determine the Version of a Microsoft Excel Workbook

Q147732 Records Needed to Make a BIFF5 File Microsoft Excel Can Use

Q187919 INFO: BIFF8 BOUNDSHEET Record Data for Uncompressed Unicode

Microsoft Word

Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft Word binary file format. For additional information about Microsoft Word binary file format, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q174140 HOWTO: Determine the Version of a Microsoft Word Document

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft PowerPoint binary file format.

Microsoft Access

The Microsoft Access binary file format is proprietary. It is neither documented nor supported.

Microsoft Binder

Microsoft does not provide technical or any other type of support for the Microsoft Binder binary file format.

Microsoft Office 97 Drawing File Format

Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft Drawing binary file format.

Additional Information

All of the applications, except Microsoft Access, save their data using structured storage. A lot of useful information, independent of the specific application's file format in question, can be gathered by parsing the structured storage. An example of this type of information is document properties.

For additional information about file formats, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q186898 HOWTO: Read Compound Document Properties Directly with VC++

Q224351 FILE: DSOFILE.EXE Lets You Read Document Properties w/o Office

NOTE: The Microsoft Office binary file format documentation was removed from the MSDN in 1999. If you would like to receive this documentation, you can send e-mail to officeff@microsoft.com, or mail to:

Office File Format Documentation Request
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

Requests should contain a detailed description for planned use of this documentation.

Microsoft Office 2000 supports HTML/XML as a native file format. The documentation is provided on the MSDN under "Microsoft Office HTML and XML Reference." You can find this at the following Web site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/isapi/msdnlib.idc?theURL=/library/officedev/ofxml2k/ofxml2k.htm

REFERENCES

Microsoft Word Developer's Kit (ISBN:1-55615-880-7)
Microsoft Excel 97 Developer's Kit (ISBN: 1-57231-498-2)

Additional query words: biff xls xla doc dot ppt ppa mdb mda obd OFF97

Keywords : kbAccess kbAccess97 kbExcel kbSDKExcel kbPowerPt kbSDKWord kbWord kbGrpDSO kbDSupport kbinfo kbWord97 kbpowerpt97
Version : WINDOWS:2000,97
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbinfo