Hacker News Reader

with the previous format being essentially a memory dump, i'd say that's progress

That’s correct - I worked with MS team that documented old formats, and they said that sometimes they don’t have people left who knew what specific struct was intended for - although that was mostly for people PowerPoint and Visio, excel and word was better documented

Actually Excel was the only one that had official, freely available documentation for the old (now legacy) file format.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com